Hi All.

I was interested to find this discussion. I had always thought all M20 girder forks were pretty much the same, with minor updates as the years went by. I was surprised to discover that pre-war forks & early WD were shorter than the rest. It would be very hard to see the difference when fitted to a bike. Bastiaan's side by side photos appear to show the 1940 blades as slightly longer than the '39s - no doubt photo distortion.
It seems my pre-war project should have the short type - at present I have a decent set of later longer blades. I should think the short ones are hard to find. Now I will have to start looking!

The dark bronze-green paint may be listed as a colour option for that model/year (if such a list still exists!) Alternatively it could be a special order colour, or simply that many years ago someone stripped the paint right off & used that green, that subsequent re-paints failed to remove. Probably a chemical analysis of the paint & undercoat might date it.

RJ

email (option): flowbench.rob@gmail.com

The obvious way to spot the difference in fork lengths is the ugly 1/2" spacer under the fork to the mudguard. Ron

email (option): ronpier@talk21.com

In most cases yes Ron this is the situation with the distance piece - but on 1940 forks the “ trumpet “ was cut short & the distance piece was used with a dished shaped washer
I have a set of blades here & a full original June 40 deluxe rolling chassis with the short fork, cut off trumpet & distance piece
The fork at some time in production then reverted to the full trumpet & the distance piece was deleted - only to reappear with introduction of the longer fork blade which we now think is sometime mid contract in April / may 1941
Why they cut the trumpet beats me
Jo’b

email (option): jonnyob1@googlemail.com

Re spacers & cut off mudguard trumpets; could there have been point where they felt the need to raise the mudguard to get more clearance to prevent clogging in bad conditions? I've seen many a pic of bikes blathered in mud & it was an issue with off-road trials / scrambles of the era. It would have been simple to just shorten them at production time to use up earlier stock. Was the same part also used on other models that had shorter trumpets - so they just used them to maintain production? They were pretty hard pressed to produce sufficient machines for military use.

Short of deleting my previous post is it possible to remove my email from it? I assumed it would be stored offline.

Raising the mudguard for additional clearance would require different mudguard stays as well I'd have thought...Ian

email (option): ian@wright52.plus.com

That is of course entirely logical Ian! I am not an aficionado of fork stay lengths...:-)
It does seem odd to produce a part only to cut some of it off, then add a spacer! Were they actually produced like that or was it simply a common problem with them snapping off, so they are all in fact workshop repairs? I have seen quite a number of forks with either the trumpet missing / broken off or repaired, as with mine; the trumpet snapped off half way & welded back in place.

RJ