Jackie "I want my aluminum SA hub!" O'Sullivan wrote:
>Garth wonders about weight issues. Many years ago, I
>acquired (and cannot find anywhere, although I suspect
>it will someday resurface) a Sturmey-Archer hub with an
>aluminum body. I remember it being dated late 50's or
>early 60's. It was a beautiful piece, and markedly
>lighter (or at least it seemed so) than its steel-
>shelled siblings.
I've got a few of these, including one that I took apart and attacked
the innards with a grinding wheel, to save weight...there's a lot of
the planet cage and gear ring that you don't actually need. I may
have the only double-butted indicator spindle in the world!
>
>Also, didn't SA make a 5-speed for a brief moment in
>time or am I delusional?
They made 5-speeds for many years, basically a reworked version of
their 4-speeds. I used to do the conversion on a regular basis. The
last few years they also made 7-speeds, but their 7-speed was
inferior to the SRAM/Sachs and Shimano models.
>A shop I used to work at--Marblehead Cycle--had a brisk
>business in SA rebuilding.
Hey, my first paid employment was at Marblehead cycle, prob'ly 1958
or '59, assembling Raleigh 3-speeds at a dollar per!
> The old money in Marblehead road classic
>Raleighs, and--unless the hubs got gooped up with 3-in-
>one oil, the only service they ever really needed was
>new pawl springs, and very occasionally pawls.
Marblehead was an early nucleus of dropped-bar cycling, in the late '50s-early '60s, when such bikes were rarely seen elsewhere. I remember feeling safe parking my 12-speed Elswick in Harvard Square, Cambridge, even though that was then (as now) the hottest spot for bike theft in New England--but back then the thieves were after Raleigh 3-speeds, and a bike with drop bars was too weird-looking and easily spotted to be readily fence-able.
See also http://sheldonbrown.com/
I've got some Marblehead panoramas at: http://sheldonbrown.com/
There are some of my mother's paintings of Marblehead at:
http://sheldonbrown.com/
Sheldon "'Whip!' 'Rock 'Em!'" Brown
Newtonville, Massachusetts
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