In his lament about the test run on his '49 Waller "Kingsbury," Neil
Foddering notes that it has a Bayliss Wiley Unit Bottom Bracket. This
seems to meet the description of the BB that came with my Andy Hamel,
from Long Island. It is a neat unit, pictured at eBay 370094833808.
Hilary Stone notes that the design might have helped solve a
construction problem, by allowing the use of a thin-wall BB shell when
building lugless:
http://www.wooljersey.com/
Hilary's picture also suggests a solution to Neil's problem of the unit bb rotating: Hilary's bike, and my Hamel, have a grease fitting that can project down into the slot machined in the Bayliss Wiley bb.
Elegant, eh?
Would love to find out more about this system: did others make competitive products? Were they strictly used on lugless bikes (like the Thanet)? Considered an up-market or premium feature?
thanks,
harvey sachs mcLean va usa
What ho, cycling chums!
If you want to see photos of the very nice lightweights on the last ride of the season for the V-CC's Hampshire Section, go to:
http://smg.photobucket.com/
The first photo is of my 1949 Waller "Kingsbury"; I'd completed it's rest oration the night before the ride, and the ride itself was it's test run. What a good idea that was. It all went suspiciously well until 3/4 of th e way round the ride, when the cranks not only went round and round, bu t also started to go up and down and from side to side. The Bayliss-Wiley Unit bottom bracket had started to dismantle itself, in that the steel sl eeve was coming unthreaded from the fixed cup, not a candidate for roadsi de repair. I managed to limp back to the start via a short cut.
For those of you who will be restoring a bike designed for these Unit bb's (e.g., Waller, Thanet, Paris/Rensch) the following MAY be of interest .
One of my companions told me that he'd had the same problem with his Paris Tour de France, and remedied it by cementing the steel sleeve in the fram e, thus effectively converting the plain bottom bracket shell to a thread ed one. Peter Brown told me that the usual method was to drill the undersi de of the bottom bracket shell and the Unit bottom bracket sleeve, and ta p the sleeve for a 2BA or 5mm dome head screw. Then a 2BA (or 5mm) screw s hould be screwed through the hole in the shell and into the sleeve, to s top the sleeve undscrewing.
The Waller is different from most others, in that it has two lugs on the bottom bracket shell which locate on the flats of the fixed cup to stop it rotating, but nothing to stop the sleeve unscrewing from the fixed cup. Since I didn't want to drill my pristine Waller bb shell, nor to fill it with epoxy, I dismantled the Unit bb, cleaned and degreased the threads on the sleeve and the fixed cup, and then applied epoxy to the threads , and screwed the fixed cup tightly into the sleeve. (Even I wasn't stup id enough to epoxy the threads for the adjustable cup). My reasoning was t hat I didn't want to maim the Waller, that it would take me a long time t o wear out the NOS fixed cup, and when it does, even if I can't undo it from the sleeve, I have spares.
Neil Foddering
Weymouth, Dorset, England