About Ebykr
Ebykr celebrates classic and vintage lightweight bicycles through provocative imagery and opinion. Ride along with us.
A practical guide to dating a vintage Fuji — finding and reading the serial number that carries its build month and year, telling the build year from the model year and confirming it all against the model, the decals, the components and the catalogs.
A practical guide to dating a Pierce bicycle from Buffalo — what the head badge says about who built it, why the first two digits are not the year, where a frame number sits on the ladder of dated examples, what the model numbers mean and which features arrived when.
Founded in 1899 as a Tokyo import house trading under a name that meant Japan-America, Fuji is one of the oldest bicycle names still in use anywhere. This timeline follows it from Meiji-era importing through domestic manufacture, a wartime renaming, three Olympic Games, the S10-S that changed the American market, Valite tubing and an early titanium frame, to two bankruptcies and the brand's latest change of hands.
Founded in 1899 as a Tokyo trading house importing American goods, Fuji was Japan's most popular bicycle by the late 1920s and, with the S10-S of 1971, ended the assumption that a serious lightweight had to be European. This is the longer story: the wartime renaming, three Olympic teams designed by a former Asian Games winner, Valite tubing, an early production titanium frame, serial numbers that actually date a frame, two bankruptcies and a brand changing hands again in 2026.
Brooks has been making saddles under the same name since 1866, in a range that has changed slowly and looked similar throughout. That is wonderful for riders and awkward for anyone holding a saddle and wondering what it is. Two…
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