Originally Posted by
conspiratemus
Putting spacers between the freewheel and the hub is not a good idea because there aren't all that many threads on the hub to begin with, and they are soft aluminum. Driven on hard by pedaling in low gear, the freewheel might strip them. Better to install spacers under the locknut on the *left* side of the axle (and remove an equal width of spacers from the right), which will move the hub and freewheel together further to the right, closing up that gap between small cog and dropout. Leave a millimetre or so between chain and dropout. This is usually achieved by having the outer face of the right locknut protrude 3.5 - 4 mm beyond the outer face of the small cog.
You will need to move the rim back to the left (by loosening drive-side spokes and tightening left-side ones) so that it remains centred between the dropouts. This makes for a less asymmetric, and therefore stronger, wheel because the spokes now have closer to equal tension on the two sides.
If this is too much trouble for the degree of sophistication you want to apply to this "old bike from parts on hand" (and it is a fair bit of work), best just to leave the wheel as is and live with the large gap at the right dropout. As long as the derailleur high-limit stop screw is adjusted properly (as mentioned by a previous poster) it will work fine.
(To optimize chainline, the smallest rear cog should be closer to the dropout than yours is going to be, but this is more important in theory than in practice. I mention it for completeness, since you were having issues with the front end as well, which also affects chainline.)
Thanks, this too is very helpful. I'll just try it as is and if the shifting is ok will keep it. I built the wheels and others for 126mm spacing + 7spd freewheels to be interchangeable for a number of old family bikes with RD's having greater range than the Nuovo Record. The 6spd I was planning to use is max 26T, but I have read that others have made the Nuovo Record work with 7spd 14-28. Sounds like I have a lot of options to try sans freewheel spacers.
BTW: the bike is a top-of-the-line 73 Holdsworth Super Mistral Fastback that was custom made for me when I was 16 as a Christmas present from mom and dad, so it's pretty special to me. Since college it's mostly languished through moves and garage corners for 25 years when I stopped riding and now I am putting it back on the road. The BB threads on the drive side aren't the best and the Sugino cup has more than twice the threads of the Campagnolo cup that came with the bike, so I want to keep using it.
It was originally a 5spd with a 151 bcd pista crank, so I never had a double Campagnolo crankset until I recently bought the two on Ebay, the first-bought being cheap but not so nice. I'd expected them to work with the Sugino BB assembly from the double crankset I mounted on the bike in 1977 when I was a poor student.
I do have the 2-hole Record FD and double clamp-on Record shifters from that conversion. I had down-tube shifter bosses brazed on in the late 80s, and expected the 77 clamp-ons to supply the parts for the current refurb, but the braze-on bosses are strangely incompatible with them. The braze-ons do work with a set of Athena friction levers I bought for them. I'll post a thread about this issue, but the slots in the two outer plates of the clamp-ons, thicker chromed outer and spring steel inner, are too narrow to slide over the flats of the braze-ons.