Amplifying Greg's liking of later Winner Pro freewheels, lamenting SunTour forgetting Harvey's lessons about freewheel pawls and torque, watching the sun set on SunTour as our classic non-indexed era wound down...
Winner/Winner Pro freewheels, which replaced the earlier New Winner freewheel, were a typical later SunTour "one step forward, two steps back" product. They used only two threads for the cogs (as opposed to 3 or 4 on the New Winner), making builds and cog stocking much easier. They were better sealed, and the Winner Pro had a cool lube hole in the threads that, if used regularly, kept the bearings clean and very quiet. The 2 pawls were also cleverly not quite 180-deg opposed (185/175 or so?), so that as the bearing races wore and play developed in the body there was far less knocking noise (pretty common with New Winner freewheels). A nice step forward...
Unfortunately, the pawls were also split down the middle, thus weaker, to accomodate a new spring design that cut production costs. Even more unfortunately, first-generation bodies were also single-pawl engagement (New Winner bodies were dual-pawl engagement). Combining the weaker pawls with single-pawl engagement led to pawls shearing as soon as ATBs using Winner/Winner Pro freewheels shipped and were ridden. One step back...
Road freewheels, with smaller cogs, developed less torque so pawls rarely sheared. Unable to afford junking many thousands of freewheel bodies, SunTour rushed a dual-pawl engagement body into production and channeled all the single-pawl bodies into road ratio (under 24t max cog) freewheels. I think the dual-pawl engagement bodies got 7 or 8 audible clicks in one full revolution, and the single-pawl engagement bodies got 15 or so. I'd stay away from the single-pawl engagement bodies on a wide-ratio freewheel.
The Winner/Winner Pro also went to a new, simpler freewheel removal design that used only 4 lugs/notches. There was insufficient purchase/bite between the tool and the body, so the freewheel remover lugs often sheared before the body broke loose from the hub. After the pawls exploded leaving the freewheel useless, the tool exploded and you had to disassemble the freewheel body to remove it. Second step back.
SunTour addressed the tool/body issue by rushing a new tool into production that encircled the lugs, giving more support. This worked pretty well.
So once the market helped SunTour work out the flaws, the 2nd-gen Winner/Winner Pro freewheels, coupled with the 2nd-gen removers, were great freewheels. Too bad the market was already moving on to freehubs and cassettes....
Cheers,
PB
Paul Brodek Hillsdale, NJ
On Wed, 16 Oct 2002 20:47:11 -0400, "Harvey Sachs" <sachs@erols.com>
wrote:
>At one point, some of us tandemists started stripping freewheel
>pawls. That's when McCready started pushing "out of phase" pedaling (back
>cranks 90 degrees rotated from front) to cut the power load. I sent
>Suntour a busted ProCompe freewheel with a note. Coincidently or not, they
>came out with a new line, just for Tandems. Looked identical, but had a
>"T" on the lock ring, and much bigger pawls. They listened.
>
>>Greg Parker wrote:
>>I would definitely agree that Suntour made many wonderful components
[snip]
>>the later versions of the Winner Pro freewheel.
Paul C. Brodek
Hillsdale, N.J. U.S.A.
E-mail: pcb@skyweb.net