As everyone knows, I am prone to lengthy detailed answers, Probably good for people whose questions get answered but bad for staying ahead of the flow when it gets heavy. I’ve had a lot of correspondence hit my doorstep recently so I’m trying to keep up but If your question hasn’t been answered, bear with me, I hope to get caught up in the next couple of weeks!
Regarding the date of this bike and my earlier posts on the general subject, I have recently adjusted my CWC serial number model a bit in a couple of places due to additional information and serial numbers I have collected. Based on my original model your bike would be from about the middle of 1949, based on my revisions I would push the date up about a half year to very early 1950.
I initially based my prediction for the cut-off between Cw and ACw serial numbers by apportioning the serial numbers over the time they were used and weighting the model to follow a curve based on the total annual American bicycle production for those years. This modeling placed the transition in about the middle of 1949.
Your bike is serialed at the very beginning of the ACw sequence. Based on some of the most recent bicycle serial numbers that I have recorded, cross-referenced with period ads, I have decided a better prediction for the change is the end of 1949. Ads produced for Christmas 1949 still depict bikes with the earlier style dropouts and without the bumper style truss rods and rack struts. One very late Cw bike has turned up with these features so it is possible that the serial number change actually occurred in early 1950. (It is also possible that the Christmas 1949 ads were produced enough in advance of the end of 1949 that changes in the details and the serial number patterns did occur before the end of the year.)
In the broader scheme of things, I have currently set the model to show the Cw/ACw shift at the cusp of the 1949/1950 calendar shift. While this makes some logical sense the fact is that the Cw number series appears to have been fully run out (to J99999? - J97520 Cw has been recorded) so it is likely that the change was production driven rather than calendar based. I am still inclined to believe the change may have preceded January 1 1950 but either way the model is probably not far off. The other thing this indicates is that CWC may have beat the industry trend that has annual output shrinking a bit after the immediate postwar boom.
