Originally Posted by rustystrings61

I no longer have the book, but I have a memory of reading in a vintage British cycling manual of a B.S.A. 2-speed hub gear with a selector switch to allow fixed or freewheel operation. I think two cables were used to work it, one for gear shifts and the other to switch modes. My memory is that the tooling, etc., for this were destroyed during the Second World War.



Amen to that. THE single biggest mistake I made when I ordered my Mercian Vincitore in 2002 was that I did not specify traditional long forward-opening "horizontal" dropouts. They chose to fit Campagnolo track ends - AND to drill and tap holes in the surface for fender mounts, rather than the easier to work with brazed-on fender mounts my riding buddy's 2005 had added. This weekend I discovered another nasty aspect to this setup when I reconditioned my drive train. Almost from the beginning I ran this bike with 16T and 18T fixed cogs, for pavement and for gravel. The drill was to loosen the brake quick release, loosen the track nuts (now release with the q/r) and slide the wheel forward, drop the chain off the cog onto the axle between the lockring and the dropout, then slide everything back out of the track end, disentangle the wheel and flip it 'round, load the chain onto the end of the axle, reinsert, get the cog back on the cog, tension the chain and tighten the wheel. But now that I am running a freewheel on one side, to get everything to go back together I have to remove the chain from the chainring to get enough slack to reassemble things. Forward opening dropouts would be soooooo much easier!

On the other hand - all of this is child's play on the '73 Raleigh Competition with forward-opening Huret dropouts, two chainrings and a choice of two fixed cogs or two cogs on a single freewheel.