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| 1960s Raleigh 20 Shopper |
The Dawes Kingpin was on the market about two or three years before the Raleigh Twenty. Unlike the hand built Kingpin the Twenty was mass produced, and to a very tight budget, resulting in a very cheaply built machine. Raleigh used a lot of penny pinching cheap components, used their own in house bottom bracket which meant it was difficult to fix or upgrade, they used nylon bushes in the headset instead of steel ball bearings, and there where many other cheap components and short cuts.
Raleigh being a much larger company than Dawes had the budget for mass marketing, and therefore the R20 became a much more successful bike. It was still shit though, the Dawes Kingpin in the opinion of this correspondent, is a much better, more refined, classier machine.