Hi Skills, I received your PM, here’s some information to help.
The 1953 ad shows a 26-inch luxury liner in front of a 24-inch junior bike, which is not what you have.
The frame you have is a 1954 AMF/CWC built frame. It has the rear dropouts that usually date a frame to 1950-1953. During 1954, AMF redesigned and modernized their frames and incorporated front exit dropouts along with “flat” chain stays that no longer had the CWC characteristic upsweep. The old style pre 54 frames were produced for a while as the new frame design was being phased in.
The Luxury Liner and the Pleasure Liner were the one/two punch in the CWC/AMF Roadmaster line for years. The names themselves were applied to a series of bicycles that varied in specification and design depending on the model year.
Through 1953 the Pleasure liner was based on the 3-Gill frame and tank (the tank and frame have a curved underside and lower top tube) while the Luxury Liner was built on the straight bar frame and used the tank with the chrome corrugated ribs.
During 1954 the Luxury Liner was redesigned for the new modernized 1954 frame and received a new tank with horizontal striations. The old Luxury Liner tank with the corrugations continued to be produced and was used on a new version of the Pleasure Liner that also used the new frame with the older, dated LL sheet metal.
In the interim, between these two versions of the Pleasure Liner, it appears that another variant was produced. Here is one shown on the Nostalgic.net website:
http://www.nostalgic.net/pictures/bicycle1141/4141.htm
This bike has the plain version of the postwar straight bar tank, the 1953 “only” headbadge and Pleasure Liner decals. I don’t have a serial number for this bike but I would guess it is from mid to late 1953 or early to mid 1954.
The tank that you have and that is on the bike in the link is not specific to the interim Pleasure Liner. It was used for several years as the second tier, unadorned tank on standard mid level models, It was available on bikes in the Roadmaster line as well as models branded for other retailers. Some of those retailers used badges with distinctive mounting holes while others used badges with variations of the standard Roadmaster graphics.
Putting all of the above together, your frame is from 1954, one of the last produced with the horizontal rear exit drops. The tank matches that of the interim Pleasure Liner but it is a tank that was produced for several years and for many models, it may or may not be original to the frame. The Roadmaster badge you have may also be original to the frame or not? It appears the frame may have originally been red; this may also be a valuable clue to its original trim level and whether or not it was a Pleasure Liner. It is possible that your bike was originally identical to the bike in the link but it also may have been offered as another model mid-line Roadmaster or as a midline retail branded bike. Unless there are decal remnants under the paint it is probably impossible to tell how the bike was originally marketed and equipped.
The tight definition of restoration is to return an object to the exact state in which it was originally produced. With bicycles this is often impossible if there is not enough evidence remaining to discern that state. Replication, as opposed to restoration, is choosing an original specification and building to that. In the case of this bike, you have the beginnings of an interim Pleasure Liner or you could build it to the specifications of one of the similar retail bikes.
Best,
Phil
