Okay I have this Raleigh Gran Sport that a neighbor thoughtfully left next to the dumpster when he moved out. It had a broken rear der and he left it pretty much locked up on his front porch exposed to the elements.



The plans are to strip it and refinish it. Use some frame saver and reuse as many of the original parts as possible. That's not the problem. The problem is what to do about replacing the freewheel. The rear spacing is 120 mm. Don't really want to stretch it (though I may have to since I can't find any 5 cog freewheels anywhere, they can only get more scarce).

So how do you guys handle rebuilding the rear drive train? What's the best advice here?

great dumpster find....

5sp freewheels are available (See IRD). A 6sp would also probably work fine

Thanks evwxxx, I think I looked everywhere but IRD. Now that I've looked I've found the solution to the free wheel problem nicely.

Looks like Bicycle Classics (https://00eda5d.netsolhost.com/freewheel.html) has some other brands available too.

Now that was nice. They have NOS Suntour freewheels too. Since the freewheel I have now is Suntour I might go that direction. The 5 sped even cost the same as the IRD freewheels but I'm thinking that the narrow 6 speed freewheels would might be a nice upgrade. Having the bigger cogs might be a bit nicer on my 50 year old knees. The plan is to get it up and running though and making improvements later on however this would probably be a good improvement to start with like my plan to keep the friction shifters, though I'm moving them from the down tube to the handlebar ends.