scarlson 

It's got a '76 date on it. Very neglected Raleigh Sports. Thought I would be able to get it going with a quick rebuild, but it wasn't so.

Obviously it needs a new axle.


One question: Are the gears supposed to fit loosely on the pins like that? Or is that wear as well?


I think @nlerner is going to help me with parts, so I should be ok as soon as I slip on some gloves to measure the axle so I make sure I can get the proper length!

PlymouthJLA 

That's brutal. Oil and rust make for a pretty stellar grinding compound.

nlerner

I found a few spare parts for @scarlson:

52telecaster

Never saw one that bad!

Velo Mule

That looks like it has been dragged through more than a few swamps.

I did a double look at that sun gear pinned to the axle. At first, I saw that the gear was warn, but that second look allowed me to see the original height of the gear on either side of the where the four pinon gears were running. Someone kept riding that bike despite such extensive wear. I've got to image that the gears would skip and disengage when pedaling hard.

PlymouthJLA 

I was thinking the same thing, and can you imagine the racket that hub must have made?

cudak888 

I'm thinking the racket the bike's owner must have made, lamblasting that "British junk" for being unreliable, completely unaware of the fact that this particular AW hub was clearly abused and ill-maintained to boot, and still managed to work to an extent.

-Kurt

repechage

Might be time for a donor hub.
even if rebuilt, no out of the saddle pedaling I think would be safe

scarlson 

Pedaling hard? Ha, it would skip and disengage when the wheel was in the air and I was turning the cranks by hand!

It was like you'd expect, yeah. Lots of grinding. Grind, clatter, CRACK, grind tick CLANG! Depending on the gear. Low was worst. Middle was, of course, pretty ok. High was also bad, but less bad than low.

When I got the bike (rescued from Harvard's annual abandoned bike purge - even the charities wouldn't take it), I noticed it didn't have a gear cable or indicator chain. I assumed they had been pilfered or cannibalized to keep another on the road. Not that uncommon. But with no cable in, it should have been in high, but it was clearly in middle gear. So I grabbed a spare cable and indicator and hooked her up and then this happened: in low, there was no drive, just clanking and grinding; in high, same as middle but noisier, and middle was, well, middle - direct drive. So I thought maybe pawls were stuck in low and I didn't know what the heck about high because high usually works if middle works. And then I found this!

I think the owner had taken off the cable and indicator and was just running it as a one speed, and then abandoned it upon graduation. Not a horrible fate, I guess?

scarlson 

The only thing you can't replace on these is the hubshell. That is fine. And the ratchet teeth also seem fine. You can push (or screw depending on the year) the left (low gear) ratchet out of the hub if you need/want to replace it. It's really nice because you don't have to rebuild the wheel.

Miraculously, I think this one only needs those gears/axle and pawl spring that nlerner posted. I still have to assess the teeth on the ring gear, which may be worn but probably will be fine.

But yes, I am regretting having cut apart the three-speed EA3 wheel from a '70s Columbia Sports (kinda lousy even when new) just a few months ago. The Raleigh rim and spokes are better quality, and the Columbia build quality is crap, but this one has seen a lot of crap. I could have swapped, one and done, and instead I'm rebuilding. I promised the bike to a good friend's boyfriend for short money, so I've got to deliver. (so they can ride together, cuuuuute )

cudak888 

Now I have to see a photo of the Sports this came off of.

I've seen more than a few disconnected or missing indicator chains, but can't seem to fathom how removal of the indicator could have helped anything that much. At the end of the day, regardless of what gear it's in, the power gets transferred to the now-wrecked sun pinion...which no longer does what a sun pinion is supposed to do. I can only imagine the play in the planetary pinion shafts allowed them to jam against the axle as if they were roller clutches in a Shimano Nexus hub, engaging it at times.

Oh well, we'll just blame it on nlerner. There isn't a Sports in Cambridge that he hasn't sold at least once, right Neal?

-Kurt

P.S.: You should never feel bad about parting out a Columbia Sports. Ever.

SirMike1983 

I would not hesitate to use the wheel. Columbia/Westfield quality had gone south by the 1970s. Those bikes can give decent service in some cases, but they were hit hard with cost-cutting by the 1970s. If you come across an old school 1940s-50s Columbia roadster though, definitely worth fixing up. I had a pre-war "pencil stay" Westfield Sports Roadster that was a really nice bike, and something very different from the usual.

scarlson 

I'll take a picture when I next see it. The paint is that brown color so it pretty much just looks like rust anyway.

That's not entirely true. You are right for low and high, but in middle gear, the clutch drives the ring gear carrier which drives the hubshell via the pawls, so the sun and planets are just along for the ride, chattering and grinding as they go in this case.

Maybe this is why Neal is being so generous with parts!

Good to hear that from someone else. They really do not seem like good things.

cudak888 

Shoot, you're right. Completely forgot.



Every bit of their construction says "run away" - from the whippiness of the frames in general, to the crimped flat fork dropouts, tubing that's butted together with no real effort, and - unlike an internally-lugged Carbolite Peugeot - edges that don't appear to be cleaned off after mitering. Oh, and dropouts literally spot welded onto flattened steel.

There are Huffy and Murrays of this period that look better than the average Columbia Sports (or Tourist - let's not forget they appropriated that name too).

-Kurt

scarlson 

Yeah, even the way the spokes were waaay too small for the holes in the hub. That's why I cut apart that wheel! It was fairly awful.

cudak888 

That pretty much defines a Columbia.

"How's this?"
"That'll fit!"
"Sounds good!"

Applies to anything on it.

-Kurt