That is what I was thinking, but not sure. Like a combined between cottered cranks and hollowtech cranks that uses a hollow tube for a bb spindle.

Took some more photos of the presumed hi-e hubs.

Pretty clean...
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/...2-1c233e43880d

There's no reason to think that those aren't Hi-E hubs, but.... there is some weird stuff going on.
On both hubs, there is a large bolt head on the right (drive) side. My hub only has a 5mm hole through the axle, and this bolt looks too large to pass through a 5mm hole.





On the rear hub, the left (non-drive) side has some extra nuts or washers in line with the axle.
I'm starting to wonder if someone modified the hub to allow a shaft larger than 5mm to pass through the axle? The 5mm hole is just part of the "end caps" that fit onto the shaft that passes through the hub and bearing.... at least that's how it looks in the drawings.



It might be fun (or frightening) to pull off the wheels and get a good look at what is going on.

Steve in Peoria

Here are some “after” shots. This is a remarkable bike.

And it weighs?

17.9 pounds. For comparison, my 1975 P13 Paramount (admittedly with heavy Brooks Pro saddle) weighs 23.5.

Stunning! Fantastic work 3xLittle500 You deserve the Restoration of the Year award for 2024.

How is the ride and confidence in shifting from the seat tube?

Thanks! Lots of work but it feels worth it. I haven’t glued the tires yet as I think the final build may have NOS Clement red silks. Still trying to get a friend to part with them. And this isn’t ideal riding weather here anyway. I think adjusting back to friction lever shifting of any kind will be the main thing, though I do ride my 1975 Paramount occasionally.

Very exciting things happening in this thread!

My humble contribution for now is a picture of a Charlie Cunningham modified Hi-E hub with very wide flange spacing. The outer lip holding the bearings has also been machined away and the flange end sections have been riveted to the main body so that the bearings can be replaced much more easily. The picture caption also says that a grease guard port has been added, although this may have been an erroneous interpretation. It's interesting to try to figure out how a grease guard system could have been added, given that it needs internal seals to direct grease only to the bearings and prevent the grease from filling the whole hub cavity in order to work as Charlie intended.




This is from the 2002 Summer issue of the Rivendell Reader, which also has pictures of Charlie Cunningham's unusual early steel folding bicycle and some other neat things. Charlie had some things in common with Harlan in terms of the will to experiment and innovate.

The whole issue can be accessed here:
https://notfine.com/rivreader/RR27.pdf

Well I can't say for sure that this particular hub was GreaseGuard™, but the early GG hubs were in fact Hi-E hubs that Charlie deconstructed and modified. How the internal seal worked, I haven't a clue. But this hub could be one of those, and I'm gonna say it likely is, since the person who took the pic and wrote it up says it is. We'll probably never know.

EDIT: Oops I lost track of which thread I was in (had them both open in different tabs...) I will post this in the "first titanium bicycle" thread.

On the subject of early Ti frames, have I told this story yet? I took the Ti framebuilding class at UBI taught by Gary Helfrich, in '91 or '92 (I forget). After a few long days of nonstop welding we got a rest day, a field trip to Teledyne Wah Chang in Albany OR, at that time the largest maker of Ti billets and pierced billets (from which seamless tubing is made). The operation was so gigantic we had to drive from one building to the next in cars. Forges that looked to be the size of a cruise ship, except then you find out that the thing extends two stories down below the floor, the part you see is a fraction of the total weight. But anyway, to the main point of my story:

In the company library, when the librarian was told we were bike frame builders, it jogged a memory and he was able to find a few pics of an employee-made Ti frame from way back, '60s I think. I remember at the time thinking "hey that's before the Linair Titan" but this was over 30 years ago, so don't rely on my memory.

Unlike Linair and Barry Harvey, who made many errors in judgment that doomed the Titan, this guy did it right! He used alloy tube (probably 3/2.5) instead of the pure (CP) Ti on the titan, and it was all oversized, none of that goofy necking-down for shifters etc. like on the Titan.

Not sure if Wah Chang had even been purchased by Teledyne yet at that point, but even if it had, the various branches of Teledyne were mostly unaware of what the others were doing, so there wasn't any way that Barry or Albert Eisentraut (who helped with the Titan design), ever knew about the engineer at Wah Chang. And the guy only made one, for himself. The Librarian of course had no idea what became of the bike, maybe it's still out there somewhere. In the pics, the welds looked pretty lumpy, so maybe the bike broke and got melted down. But the world of Ti bike frames might look a lot different today if the guy had decided to form a bike frame company and hire a good welder, back in the '60s.

This is good to know! I hope somebody has pictures that show the grease guard zirc/port on hi-e hub because I'd be very interested to see where it's located...

The Hi-E hub may have been the inspiration for the WTB greaseguard hubs. Charlie may have experimented by adding grease ports to Hi-E hubs, but I don't remember ever seeing one. I worked as an apprentice for Charlie in 1983 after that, I opened the closest bicycle store to his house/shop. I have spent a lot of time over the years in his shop with him showing me his latest projects. In my opinion, the author of the article is not correct. Greaseguard happened with the WTB hubs that I think were machined by Paragon.

Of course the Grease Guard ports weren't like Zerks, they would be hard to see and could even be mistaken for a rivet of the type that some of these parts featured, if not hidden altogether.
And such a grease port is very lightweight, almost like the ones in Campagnolo hub bearing covers.

I said "the early GG hubs were in fact Hi-E hubs that Charlie deconstructed and modified" and I should correct that to "at least one or two prototype GG hubs were reconstructed Hi-E, I think" Maybe just a pair for him and one for Jacquie before the one-piece shell WTB hubs became available? Pretty sure the ones I saw (or dreamt I saw?) were on Jacquie's bike. Isn't there at least one old-ish Cunningham in the Hall of Fame? Oughtta be in the Smithsonian too! Not that there are very many of them out there, shame to take one out of circulation to put it in a museum.

If my memory is a hallucination and no Hi-E hubs were ever modified with grease-guard ports, then I humbly apologize.

I might be interested if you’d like to part with a set of hi-E hubbed/ rimmed wheels. Bonus if the Siamese spoked type.