Harvey's right about the slot for the oiler, but on the Waller, this wa sn't relevant, because the Waller has no oiler on the BB shell (or elsewh ere for that matter) and the lugs on the BB which locate on the fixed cup f lats don't permit the slot to line up with where an oiler would be anyway. Regardless of the Waller's quirks, I don't think that an oiler nipple wo uld protrude enough into the slot in the sleeve, and even if it did, th e slot is so wide, relative to a 2BA oiler, that it would allow substan tial back and forth play of the whole unit, so I believe that the only pr actical solutions are the ones I've mentioned.
There were indeed other makes of unit BB: Harden I beleieve, designed one , though I don't know whether many were made, and TD Cross (TDC) produc ed a Bayliss Willey copy. They enabled makers to use a nice, cheap piece of large-diameter tubing for brazed frames, and they also enabled lugged frames with stripped BB threads to continue to be used, without having t o have a new shell.
Neil Foddering
Weymouth, Dorset, England
> Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 16:13:55 -0500
> From: hmsachs@verizon.net
> Subject: re Bayliss Wiley "Unit Bottom Bracket"
> To: neilfoddering@hotmail.com; classicrendezvous@bikelist.org; hmsach
s@verizon.net
>
> 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/
> 202008/
>
> The first photo is of my 1949 Waller "Kingsbury"; I'd completed it's re
st
> oration the night before the ride, and the ride itself was it's test ru
n.
> 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-Wile
y
> 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 road
si
> 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 intere
st
> .
>
> One of my companions told me that he'd had the same problem with his Pari
s
> Tour de France, and remedied it by cementing the steel sleeve in the fr
am
> e, thus effectively converting the plain bottom bracket shell to a thre
ad
> ed one. Peter Brown told me that the usual method was to drill the under
si
> 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 th
e
> bottom bracket shell which locate on the flats of the fixed cup to stop i
t
> 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 i
t
> with epoxy, I dismantled the Unit bb, cleaned and degreased the threa
ds
> on the sleeve and the fixed cup, and then applied epoxy to the thread
s
> , and screwed the fixed cup tightly into the sleeve. (Even I wasn't st
up
> 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