At 12:18 PM -0800 12/3/08, Norris Lockley wrote:
> My lasting impression was that the rider would have to be 110%
> certain of having engaged the locating surfaces and of having torqued up t
>he securing rod between the various elements, before leaping on the bike an
d jumping on a big gear.
As you can see on the e-bay auction, the teeth are slanted, so they self-align. While it may be possible to install the hub so that it is not engaged correctly with the freewheel, it would be hard to do. I know several people who have put many thousands of kilometers on that system. Cinelli introduced a similar system for racing, and lightning-fast wheel changes.
Campagnolo used a similar idea for their freewheel remover, to
prevent the slipping of the remover (and gashing of the faces on the
freewheel body) so common with the more traditional designs.
>Sceno234 also had a 54cms R Herse frame in stock, painted up in that dismal
> utilitarian petrol blue enamel.. Everything had neen dismantled. He confir
>med that it was a 1961 model and showed the 6 and 1 digits stamped undernea
>th the fork crown. Although that work and the associated brazing was of a h
>igh standard the same could not be said of the fitting of the drop-outs. On
>e of the bldaes had been slotted to accept the drop-out cetrally, while the
> other blade had a slot well off the centre-line and towards the inner edge
> of the blade. Worse still this drop-out was brazed into the blade with its
> upper edge proud of the curvature of the blade tip, while the other drop-o
>ut was lower than the rounded surface. There must have been about a sixteen
>th of an inch difference, made much more noticeable by the fact that dirt a
>nd grease had settle in the lower slot. No post-brazing filing and cleaning
> up had been carried out.
I doubt that the fork blades you describe came from Herse that way. Having examined quite a number of Herse bikes, you may not like his style, you can fault the paint, but the construction usually is flawless.
If something is decidedly odd on an Herse, it's usually a later modification, by somebody else. In fact, you describe the fork crown being flawless, but the dropouts being butchered, indicating that they were not done by the same person.
Jan Heine
Editor
Bicycle Quarterly
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Seattle WA 98122
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