So I've been riding my beloved 1972 Raleigh Pro on the rollers (rather than the road) and I haven't done a lot of shifting. This winter when I went to use it I discovered that the rear derailleur is really sticky -- it's really hard to pull on the shift lever and the spring can't move it to the smallest cog. This is a patent 72 Nuovo Record.


I take the derailleur apart and it's the parallelogram. Three of the pivots are fine (you can tell because you can easily slide the plates from side to side -- there's about 1/2 mm of play there), but one pivot is exhibiting a lot of friction. I cleaned the parallelogram in my cheapo ultrasonic cleaner (thinking maybe there was some dried grease in there), the parallelogram got really clean but it was then even harder to move back and forth. I then alternated saturating the pivots with triflow and moving the linkage back and forth a hundred times.


It's now about the same friction-wise as it was when it went into the ultrasonic cleaner. Right now the sticky pivot is soaking in Kroil as I have run out of ideas. Am I outta luck here? I know it's theoretically possible to replace those pivot pins but I think you need some special equipment (as well as replacement pins). Is there some magic method to freeing these up? I searched the forum and couldn't find anything.


Thanks for any help...