If I can add anything, it would be from
the perspective of a guy who weekly
gets a fly's eye view from the wall looking
onto the various degrees of mechanical
ineptitude that wander through a do it
yourself bike coop.

Can a standard threaded freewheel be
forced onto a french threaded hub by
the clueless? Absolutely, happens with
alarming frequency. Is the hub ruined
in this case? Pretty much, although if
you just leave the wrongly threaded
freewheel in place, the wheel can give
quite a bit of service still in most cases.
I guess it has to do with all those loose
metal shavings that used to be threads
now acting as filler.

I'm afraid that in the rough and tumble
world of do it yourself bike maintenance,
the sad fact is that bozos rule. When
somebody doesn't know enough to even
know what they ought to be asking about/
careful of, you're just gonna have a fair
amount of collateral damage. I try to
view it as "learning experience", but I'm
not always sure how much "learning" results.

There's one poor orderly soul who does yeoman
service as a mechanic manager at our shop who
I fear will someday have a stroke if he witnesses
yet another particularly egregious abuse of tool
(and I am not using this as a euphemism for
self abuse in this instance).

Mike Larmer

p.s. as an interesting side note, did you know
that m*sturb*tion is one of the forbidden
words that the forum server is programmed
to block?