All this talk about rear-ward facing drop-outs and 1940s woollen racing jer seys, with the two front pockets and those old manufactirers' logos embroid ered on, must have stirred up something in my sub-conscious, although my wi fe would state that sub-consciousness is my habitual state of mind.
An earlier contri referred to the blue Alcyon jersey with the second sponso rs logo, Dunlop embroidered into place, and this image set off a chain of t hought about bikes and sponsors of an earlier era.
One of the bikes on my not yet very urgent, but not quite out-of-mind resto ration list is a fully original but hand-painted black 1920s AUTOMOTO racin g machine. At the moment the bike is stripped down and the fork has been di smantled from the frame, just the bottom-bracket remains to be extracted an d...the fork-ends. It has been in this state for about two years since my i nitial enthusiasm started to wear off.
This frame is unsual, very unusual in that its rear facing drop-outs adjust in the opposite dircetion from the track frame rear-facing drop-outs that we have recently been discussing. Imagine the micro-adjusting drop-outs on a GIOS "Compact" road frame (just about on-topic I hope) and then sort of r everse the adjusters.
On the superbly engineered AUTOMOTO adjustable drop-outs the rear wheel is attached to two hard-chromed plates, one each side, with rearward-facing sl ots, the plates being attached to adjusting screws.These plates can be deta ched from the frame completely. The adjusting rods pass through a hole in a plate brazed to the end of the chainstay. Onto the adjusting rods before a ssembly of the plates into the frame, a nut is screwed, the end of th e rod is inserted through the hole and the adjusting screws are turned unti l they bear against the plate with the hole in it. The chromed plates slide along small key-ways in order to keep them in accurate parallel alig nment and truly vertical.. It is all beautifully engineered.
Whereas the banjo type track adjusters (Thanks Ted for that name) adjust th e chain tension by pulling the wheel backwards, the Automoto tensioners ten sion it by pushing it backwards.. On the CR Automoto site there is an Autom oto bike suspended from the ceiling of someone's bike shop - Dale's perhaps - and I wonder if that has the same mechanisms.
Knowing that in this world you seldom get anything for nothing, and as York shiremen such as myself say .."If you do something for nothing, then make s ure you do it for yourself.."..there is a price I ask for the above piece o f engineering information. If anyone on the LIst has an Automoto with rear drop-outs such as I have described, then the betting is that it will also h ave Automoto's patented sealed bottom bracket.
The restoration of this fine machine was put on the back burner for the sim ple reason that after hours of spanner-manipulating and head-scratching I s till haven't worked out how to extract the bottom bracket unit form t he bracket shell, let alone dismantle the unit itself. Chance would be a ve ry fine thing.
So come on ,someone....explain it to me, please.
Norris Lockley..Settle Uk
Norris Lockley
---- Msg sent via TalkTalk WebMail - http://www.talkta
lk.net/