Steve
How can you tell the cases are not stamped? And how can the bike be a Sandcast if it's E23XXXXXX?
Ken, by unstamped i mean the vin pad left the factory with no vin stampings on it; i.e., blank pad. i'm making the call from looking at the seller's pictures show a 9-hole clutch cover and the vin pad is the "unframed" type consistent with sandcast only. Other than that i didn't look very close, but the pictures also seemed to show a rough texture on case surface. anyone please feel free to tell me i'm wrong.
excessive rapid chain stretch was such that early on the factory actually had to produce sandcast (unstamped) cases to deal with the number of cases that were being damaged. i've had a couple sets of them over 10, maybe even 15 years ago. given the vin pad was left blank by the factory, it was up to the person who did the rebuild to stamp the vin into the pad; we've seen some pretty nifty botch jobs of vin stampings.
Chris R would know off the top of his head, but the E238xxxx vin someone stamped on cases is from the K5 series i'm suggesting..... kind of unusual to see that high of a vin on unstamped cases because by 1975 metallurgy and chain design was such that excessive loosening was not a problem. and the fact some dealer had a set of unstamped sandcast cases in inventory as late as 1975, as the factory was producing diecast cases well before that time.
the stampings are shallow enough that they could be removed without losing much height off the pad, so the cases would be good for anyone needing a later set of cases that had the wide pad. i don't ever recall of hearing if a set of sandcast unstamped cases have been seen with the earlier narrow pad.
i'm pretty certain there are some threads on th eforum on vin pads and stampings, in fact pretty sure Mr. McGovern is the author of some of the threads.
imho, the $5,000 "bin" is stratospheric; the seller has been reading this forum and watching ebay prices and smoking crack to put a price of $5k. the last pair i had i sold for $1200 and it took me a while to sell them, i was afraid i'd have to give them away, but that was at least 10 years ago, i'm aware things have changed, but i can't imagine $5k worth.