Classic & Vintage - sturmey archer and rear deraileur?

http://cgi.ebay.com/X-RARE-Raleigh-Sports-9-spd-3-spd-Hub-3-spd-Freewheel_W0QQitemZ250447528590QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3a4fd6028e&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A10%7C66%3A2%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318%7C301%3A0%7C293%3A6%7C294%3A50

Has anyone ever seen this type of rear wheel setup?What is the reason for a setup like this?

so you can get more speeds.

Sheldon Brown did something like that, he ended up with a 64-speed bike.

It was a kit, not sure if it's factory or aftermarket. Only saw a few in 8 years as an LBS mechanic in the "70~'80s.

It's a pain to fit the cluster on, and the 3 speed sprockets don't have a wide range. I use two single sprockets - a 19T and a 24T. Works great.

I do it for the occasional hill. A standard AW is so widely spaced, it's pretty useless. It's more like, you chose the speed of your single speed, or you use a lower gear to start off. Once you get up to speed, the gearing is so wide you can't use it to adjust your cadence.

I have one of those 3-speed SA clusters and want to try it at some point. The hard part will be finding a derailleur whose cogs can handle a 1/8" chain. The Cyclo shown in that eBay bike was intended for that purpose, but was a pretty marginal performer. I'm thinking an early 60s Campy Gran Sport w/ toothless jockey wheels might work though I don't think shifting will ever be smooth.

Neal

Yes, it was an aftermarket conversion kit you could buy. Eugene Sloan describes it in The Complete Book of Bicycling. I think it cost $14 or something in the mid-60s.
The setup pictured will provide more closely spaced gearing, obviously, but won't provide very wide spacing. Like sciencemonster, I have a wider setup--48 tooth front with a 27 and a 23 in back, which gives me gears of about 35, 41, 46, 54, 62, and 72. Not much of a high, but I did what I had to do to get fairly uniform spacing with a low enough low to get me over the Green Mountains.
My derailleur is a short-cage Huret Allvit, which handles 1/8 inch chain very well. So did the short-cage Suntour Cyclone I had on there originally, but I took it off because it seemed like too much of an anachronism.
I should say that I would never have made any of that work without the information in a long-running earlier C and V thread on the subject.

The hard part will be finding a derailleur whose cogs can handle a 1/8" chain.
NealNot if you use new chain. Modern 1/8" chain from SRAM or KMC is actually narrower than 3/32" "Ten Speed" chain from the '70s and '80s. Almost any 25-30 y/o RD will work. If you have only two cogs you need one that can be limited to a narrow range of travel. I like the Huret Svelto.

The Cyclo RD really is pretty crude and takes a good deal of force to shift. And the 15-19-23 cogs on the wide ratio cogset gives many near duplicate ratios.

More useful is running 19-22 cogs for a perfectly evenly spaced 6 speed AW. You wouldn't need a 15t on that Raleigh falling off a cliff, in a vacuum, with a tailwind.

OTOH That looks like a very nice Raleigh and shipping cost is almost too good to be true.

Agree about the Svelto--its limit screws are almost infinitely adjustable, I think. That's what I'd use if I had one. The problem with the Allvit is that if you set the low-gear limit screw to where it prevents the chain from overshooting the large cog you interfere with the high-gear limit screw at the other end, making it impossible to drop onto the small cog. So I don't have a low gear limit--I just have to be careful not to overshoot, which sounds like a problem but seems not to be in practice. There's lots of space between the derailleur and the spokes. You'd have to REALLY overshift to damage anything.
I also agree about modern 1/8 chain--the modern bmx chain I'm using would probably work with most older derailleurs.

That's funny, I ended up with a Svelto on mine, too. It looks right. I had a really nice, early 50s Cyclo on there, but I just gave up on it. I really wanted it to work... I also had a Suntour and a Valentino. They all worked fine, as far as chain clearance.

Where'd you find a 27T cog? Did you make it?

Does the stock AW axle have enough clearance for 3 cogs?

http://cgi.ebay.com/X-RARE-Raleigh-Sports-9-spd-3-spd-Hub-3-spd-Freewheel_W0QQitemZ250447528590QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3a4fd6028e&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A10%7C66%3A2%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318%7C301%3A0%7C293%3A6%7C294%3A50

Has anyone ever seen this type of rear wheel setup?

Hi Vince, :)

Yup... I've got two of them.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b90/compost_bin/IMG_2571.jpg

One has the 15-19-23 1/8th inch chain sprocket on it...

...and the other has a 14-16-19-23-28 3/32 inch derailleur chain SunTour freewheel on it. I used to play around with a lot of really strange gearing in the '60 and '70's. And even bought TA chainrings from France just to have a triple 26-49-54 which was basically unheard of in those days.


Greg

Where'd you find a 27T cog? Did you make it?

Yes, I made it--bought a 27-tooth Shimano cassette cog and filed three of the six splines out of existence with the round file, then used a flat file to slightly reshape the remaining three--mostly just a matter of rounding off the corners. It's easy to do--took maybe half an hour or so. It's easier if you can clamp the cog in a vise.
It's worked well for about a year now. Not sure how robust it is, though. I'd wondered if the reshaped splines would be easy to strip out, since the metal on the cassette cog is thinner than the standard SA cog, but that hasn't happened yet. Maybe it never will. I could take it apart and look for signs of wear, but I'm too lazy to bother. If I were going on a world tour I'd probably bring along an extra 27-tooth cog.
I think I had to put a 2 mm spacer between the cogs for clearance, but it shifts very well. I did have to very slightly dish the rear wheel to center it.

I loved my 4x3 hybrid setup: 1/8" chain, 14-16-18-20 cogset, Sturmey AW hub with an extra-long axle, 40T chainring up front. The Cyclo pull-chain and bandspring derailleur was a disaster, so I replaced it with an early Campagnolo Gran Sport, which worked like a champ.

I just built a bike for a customer this week with a 3 speed Sachs hub and a 7 speed cassette. The bike was an older 26" SE OM Flyer, shifting done with grip shifters. That bike was so much fun to ride.

I just built a bike for a customer this week with a 3 speed Sachs hub and a 7 speed cassette. The bike was an older 26" SE OM Flyer, shifting done with grip shifters. That bike was so much fun to ride.
I concur. These hybrid transmissions are a blast. I set mine up with the Sturmey-Archer 3-speed trigger below the left brake handle and the derailleur control in the usual place on the downtube, for slick double shifts.