Re: [CR] My Campy BB Woe Of The Month!

(Example: Racing)

To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:12:58 -0700
From: donald gillies <gillies@ece.ubc.ca>
Subject: Re: [CR] My Campy BB Woe Of The Month!


Oh sorry, the right-side difference for an italian BB is 3mm in going from road to track, I wrote 2mm and that was a subtraction error.

I re-read your message, though, and noticed that you said it was a MID-50'S FREJUS TRACK BIKE. Is it possible that this bike had 110mm rear spacing originally ?? I don't know what that would do to the bottom bracket, or the sizing for a mid-50's campagnolo bottom bracket. The chainline for that situation is listed in catalogue #17:

http://www.campyonly.com/history/1974/chainlines.pdf

You did not tell us what is the year of your crank arm - is it post-77 ?? Remember in 1977 they went to a 114.5mm bottom bracket to meet CPSC regulations. My guess is that that they probably deepened the spindle flats within the crank arm head so that the crankset would draw down lower on the spindle, hence the chainrings would not move and the cranks would still work on pre-77 bikes (with the new 114.5mm BB.) However, they then moved the crank arms an extra 2.5mm away from the chainrings to provide clearance for the metal lip on the new-nuovo record derailleur.

You see a lot of pre-77 cranks getting scored by post-77 nuovo record derailleurs as a result ...

Anyway, if you have butchered a post-77 crankarm for this track bike, you probably need a pre-77 road bottom bracket, because the road BB behaves like a post-77 BB pista BB for your post-77 butchered crank arm. The post-77 crank will draw down by 2.5mm, and the pre-77 road BB (vs. Pista) will push up by 3mm, so the two would cancel each other out (to within 0.5mm)

If you want to use a 109mm pista bottom bracket, you probably need to find a pre-77 road crank arm for butchering purposes ...

- Don Gillies
San Diego, CA, USA