Below is a report on a non-Hetchins which this Editor has personally seen and photographed in July 2017. It is not known when or by whom it was produced. The current owner realizes that it is not a genuine Hetchins, but says it rides well.
As with many such replicas and fakes, it exhibits anomalies which betray its bogus pedigree. These include over-elaborate lugwork, and inconsistently or anachronistically matched elements.
Let's start with the serial number: H13102.
This is a valid Hetchins number, and would make it a 1983-4 build. This is prima facie an indication of genuine pedigree. Or is it? Look again at the rear dropout more closely; we're not done there yet, and compare it to the dropout below:
Notice the stay ends. The above photo shows how Jack Denny finished off stay ends; I refer to this as "chiselled." Denny started doing this in the late 1960s and continued like this until he quit building frames in 1986. Prior to that, he, like many other frame builders, rounded off the stay ends, which I call "bullets." Other builders were still using bullet stay ends after Denny used chiselled stay ends. The red frame in question here has bullets; this is suspicious for a frame with a 1982 number.
Look closely at the brake mounts:
They are recessed allen fixtures, front and rear. Now look at this frame from 1985-6, of known and certain pedigree:
It has external hex-nuts for mounting the brakes. Recessed allen fixtures came later. This is suspicious for a frame with a 1982 number.
Now, let's examine the lugwork closely.
The head lugs are ostensibly Magnum Opus Mk. ii. But the badge is suspicious. Not impossible, but not what Hetchins was usually fitting in that period. While some nearby-numbered frames had the usual head tube crest-badge in cast metal or a crest-transfer, the frames of known and certain pedigree which had neither the usual badge nor transfer, had instead what you see below, a simple "H":
Now examine the head lugs and seat lug from a different angle.
Every lug is over-elaborate, as marked in red. Compare with genuine MO Mk ii below to see the difference:
Suspicion is mounting that we are looking at a replica here. Examine the seat tube ornament and the fork crown ornament.
Again, over-elaboration is the word here. These ornaments are unknown on any genuine Hetchins. This is a bitser, cobbled together from (probably) lazer-cut bits of flat stock thrown into a gaudy heap. We have seen many different bitsers, but none with the right bits.
Finally, this is not the only bogus frame we have seen with an apparently valid Hetchins frame number. Maybe it was just a lucky coincidence; alternatively, the frame builder happened to know of some genuine Hetchins numbers and either duplicated them or 'invented' ones of his own using known ones as a sample. In any case, this is fake, as the many anomalies indicated above prove.
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