Originally Posted by
39cross
My wife has a Sprite that looks like it's the 1970 5-speed freewheel model. It originally had an Allvit that died somewhere along the line, now it sports a Shimano Eagle II. She'd like to replace the rubber blocks on the pedals, they are very worn and slippery, but it looks like the only place I can find sells pricey repros on eBay out of Thailand. So perhaps some new but similar looking pedals are what she needs. From what I've read the cranks should take a 9/16" pedal, but these pedals, it turns out are some odd sort of size. A 15mm wrench was too small, as well. I found a 5/8" wrench was needed. A 9/16" pedal will partially screw in, but of course not completely. I've been doing some searches but I haven't been able to find any more info on odd-ball thread pedal sizes. I have some 9/16" taps and was thinking of just re-tapping the threads on the crank arms. Is there any potential issue with this?
Here's a photo of the original pedals. Thanks for reading.
What your describing sounds like 9/16" threaded pedals trying to go into French, 14x1.25mm threaded cranks but I've never seen French threaded cranks on a Raleigh, especially in 1970. It maybe possible that someone swapped in a set of French cranks though.
According to Sheldon Brown's site, you can retap French threads to 9/16" but in my opinion, the two are too close in size for the 9/16" tap to really cut clean threads.
The problem with that thinking is that those pedals appear to be original Sir Raleigh scripted.
In metric, 9/16" x 20tpi thread would be 14.28mm x 1.27 compared to French 14mm x 1.25. You have to look close to see the difference on a thread pitch gauge,
The only other pedal thread size is 1/2", which is noticeably smaller.
Since you had Raleigh pedals, I'd strongly suspect that your crank arms simply need the threads cleaned up a bit with a tap or thread chaser.
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