I am going to be embarking on my first wheel building endeavor soon. I snagged a set of normandy high flange hubs for $10. Based on the freewheels I have lying around I have two options. I can keep the old 120mm spacing and use a suntour pro-compe 14-32 five speed, Or respace the hub and use a 14-32 six speed suntour perfect. Is there any real advantage to running six speeds in this situation?

A 6V Maeda Perfect gear block is going to have conventional spacing so you would want an over the locknuts dimension of 125 or 126. If you are using a solid axle this is easily done. If you are using a hollow axle you will have to replace the existing 5V one with a 6V. It will also be necessary to get a 6V length quick release skewer to use with the hub as a 5V one will not be long enough to have full thread engagement on the nut.

...then there is the matter of the spacing of the dropouts on the frame the wheel is intended for. If it is now 120 it will need to be reset to 125/126 and do an alignment check as well.

In my opinion, no, the advantage would be so small (for me) that the effort, time and possibly cash would not make it worth while. I would keep the five cog set and forget about spreading the stays(might not have to spread them). If you do change, you will need a longer rear axle and probably skewer, to ensure that you get proper purchase in the drops and adequate threading in the skewer, respectively. Of course, I could be wrong, but as a rule, that has been my experience.

The option of having an extra cog over that wide a gear ratio can make maintaining your preferred cadence easier, as at least one jump will be smaller. However, you need to calculate the individual ratios, compare them to your current setup and how it affects the gear progression and whether it increases needs for things like a double shift. Most importantly, you have to decide whether a smaller steps in the indicated position(s) are beneficial or if you currently manage fine without them. The potential gearing benefits are offset by the longer axle protrusion on the freewheel side which increases the probability of bent axles. So, if you're a heavier rider, ride regularly on poorly maintained roads or are already experiencing bent axle issues, then this option may not be for you.

In addition to the previously mentioned changes to axle length, you will probably have to re-dish the rim to centre it between the stays and have the wheel track properly. When coldsetting make sure to include a parallelism check of the dropout flats, as coldsetting to a wider spacing will take them out of parallel and introduce a bending moment of the axle which further increases of the probability of bending.

I've built up several wheels with Normandy hubs spaced 126, but I run 7 cog freewheels on them.

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I have a few 126mm skewers, and maybe an axle. I am not sure if it is the right threading though. I'll probably try the 5 speed setup and see where that goes. If it works out well then I will keep it, if not then I will do the conversion. I will probably have my hands full with just putting the wheels together.

I recommend you make your mind up about the OLD before you build the wheel, as that will affect the dish and, marginally, the ideal spoke lengths.
So far I didn't see anyone mention the Suntour Ultra 6-speed option, which, while rather expensive today, allows six cogs on the 5-speed 120mm OLD (via narrower spacing). I'm currently running 4 of my bikes on Ultra-6.

The original OLD dimensions for Normandy Sport hubs was 122mm rear and 96mm front. Weird French standard... Don't ask why...

We specialized in French bikes at our shop in the 70's. Until the late 70's the majority of the entry level French bikes (Gitane, Peugeot, Motobecane, Bertin and others) came with Normandy Sport hubs.

On up to 10% of those bikes we assembled new or serviced in our shop, 1mm - 2mm spacer needed to be inserted on the drive side of the rear axles for adequate dropout clearance with standard 5 speed freewheels. Standard width 6 speed freewheels were uncommon back then and were only found on high end performance bikes like Raleigh Pros.

Suntour narrow width Ultra-6 freewheels were designed to fit on 5 speed hubs and 120mm wide dropouts. They didn't come along until 1977. Many of them were sold as aftermarket performance items.


Getting back to Normandy Sport hubs, they had the look of better quality hubs with their large flanges and kidney bean shaped cutouts but the bearings and axles were poor quality.




We imported French bikes, components and parts back then. The Normandy Sport cups and cones were case hardened - surface hardened to a depth of .005" -.020" (0.13mm - 0.50mm).

Campy and similar high quality cups and cones are either through hardened bearing steels or case hardened alloy steels to a much deeper depth. Also those better quality cups and cones are precision ground whereas the Normandy cone were heat treated as machined and not finish ground.

Normandy Sport replacement cones came in bags of 50; the cones cost us about $0.05 each (and sold them for ~$.50 each). We inspected every bag and threw out at least 30% of them because they had surface pits in the ball track areas which led to premature failure.



The case hardening was not consistent and a lot of the cones failed prematurely. We had to replace the cones on most Normandy hubs we serviced n=100's of them.



Point I'm getting at is that unless you are looking to restore a bike to original components, you may want to consider finding some better quality hubs to build your wheels with....


verktyg

Chas.