Austrian Headset Madness! Help?
 

If anybody has a spare Austrian headset, or even parts of one, I'd love to talk.

So I'm working on an old Austro-Daimler (late 70s SLE) for the original owner, and I come to find out that the steerer tube is made for a semi-obscure Austrian sized headset. Silly me, I assumed that it would be English-thread/ISO (the bottom bracket is english-threaded, so why not?) or, in a worst case, French. I've been steadily restoring/rebuilding old bikes for several years and I didn't even know about Austrian headsets!

Worse still, the top race of the headset is threaded off-kilter so that it wobbles a bit as you screw it down and doesn't make even contact with the bearings. Even worse, upon tightening the locknut, I managed to strip some of its threads . Great! Now, I've got it reassembled without the original spacer so that the locknut gets a few good threads engaged, but I'm afraid to really tighten it down well. Ideally, I'd like to replace the top half of the headset, but ebay searches have turned up nothing. Can anyone help me out here?

Ouch! Looking at the dimensional differences between the various headsets, I was thinking at first that you could shim a set of ISO cups into the frame with three thicknesses of soda-can shim material (not ideal, but probably workable). You could also have any good bike shop reduce the fork crown from 26.7 to 26.4 to accept a standard fork-crown race. But the steerer threading seems to be a deal breaker. The thread count is the same as French, but the Austrian steerer is 1 mm larger, if I'm reading Sheldon Brown's crib sheet correctly. If you could find someone with a French die, you could maybe rethread the steerer, but that would reduce its thickness by a full mm--too much for safety, I would think.
Why am I even posting this? I'm no help. You need a replacement Austrian headset. I hope you find one.

In the same vein as Jon's post... you could have someone replace the steerer tube. At least get an estimate on what it would cost; probably less than a funky and rare headset.

No. 1 on fork replacement.

Frank the Welder in Bellows Falls is a magician when it comes to replacing steerers. Bring (or send him) your fork and a donor steerer and he'll do the job for less than a replacement fork would cost, and without damaging the existing paint. He did a brilliant job on my Gitane TdF.
Still, .3 mm all the way around seems like kind of a long way to shim the cups. But I once shimmed a set of Campagnolo cups out by about .2 mm, and it worked fine. Who else around here has experience with heroic cup-shimming?

Are there any markings on the headset that differentiate it from ISO? I have an old 77 AD Inter-10 I may part out as it has a bent fork....and is WAY too big for me (64cm)....the parts on it may be worth more than the whole

I have shimmed cups. I'm not sure how much I shimmed them, and I'm not sure whether it caused any problems. The problem is, it is very difficult do diagnose the cause of a front end shimmy. Very annoying, though. If it occurs, you start looking for the problem... and you may blame your shimmed headset, rightly or wrongly. I know I shimmed the Tange headset I have on my track bike, and that bike rides fine, no shimmy at all; I had the same headset on my Lambert (with a different fork) and it shimmied badly. That's why I replaced the fork, and so I replaced the headset at the same time. That fixed the shimmy... until I put a handlebar bag on it. :notamused:

The problem with that is if the new headset parts don't fit the frame, or don't work with the original parts on the frame. Austrian is definitely odd-ball:

http://www.os2.dhs.org/~john/headset-threads.jpg

http://www.os2.dhs.org/~john/headset-fit.jpg

Source: Sutherland's 4th Edition

I ran into a similar problem with my Austrian Steyr, only it was the bearings that simply got rough, so I was able to carefully rebuild and adjust it with a much larger # of loose ball bearings so as to finally restore accurate steering.

I concluded that the only practical solution to obtaining a replacement headset would be to buy another low-bid Steyr Clubman bike off of Craigslist, and sure enough another couple of them have come along for under $50. I didn't end up needing a replacement however, it was sufficient to discard the 14-ball retainers and replace with 26(?) loose balls together with rotating the cups and crown race.

For the OP's threading dilemma, I have many times saved similarly cross-threaded bb cup threads by removing the crooked cup then screwing it back in, using many taps of a hammer to level the cup as the cup is slowly started into the bb shell.

I'm sure that there is a good chance that this same method can be used to get the threaded headset race started on the steerer straight!
All the parts are steel here, and this bodes very well for restoring a proper fit in my experience.
Patience wins the day and I wish the OP best of luck in getting this bike back together.

A good (and frequent) eyeballing during initial installation should do the trick, and there is usually more than enough metal in the right places to get a solid connection.
The cross-threading and subsequent re-threading doesn't so much remove metal as it just moves it around. It's not like having a tap going through crooked, which would cut the metal away.

No special markings on the headset as far as I can tell, but would you mind pulling off the locknut and measuring the diameter of the steerer with a precise caliper? If it's Austrian, it'll be 26.0 (as opposed to 25.4). Needless to say, if it's Austrian I'll take it. In fact, I'm going to PM you now.

It's actually not a cross-threading issue. (I should have been more clear.) The top race is actually tapped off-axis. It threads on fine but doesn't come to rest parallel to the bearings below it or the locknut above it. Does that make sense? Anyhow, neat trick you shared. I'll have to keep that one on file for when I need it.

This might be the way to go if I'm unable to find a replacement headset. The original fork is nothing special but finding a replacement fork of the proper axle-to-crown height, rake, and steerer length and then having it powder-coated to match the frame (and then shimming the cups of a new ISO headset) seems like more trouble.

jar351 wrote:

"It's actually not a cross-threading issue. (I should have been more clear.) The top race is actually tapped off-axis. It threads on fine but doesn't come to rest parallel to the bearings below it or the locknut above it. Does that make sense? Anyhow, neat trick you shared. I'll have to keep that one on file for when I need it."


Do you think it left the factory that way?

Seems odd to me, given that these bikes were assembled by hand in those days, surely would have been noticed during adjustment(???).

But I've seen defective top races before, where the cups actually contacted one another as the bearing adjustment was finalised.
Now those were on low-end Bianchi and Viscount bikes, and I guess that I illogically expected more from the Austrian marque, even though my Steyr's headset parts looked to have been crudely stamped from relatively thin sheet.

These are the retainers that came out of mine, troubling in that only 14 balls are supposed to spread the load in those very thin-walled cups:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8097/8...2a8bf5e2_z.jpg


I do like the bike though, with it's dated 1950's frame geometry (70.5 degrees parallel and with a low-trail fork to quicken the steering) giving it a unique look among today's peloton traffic.
It's a 1961 design that they kept on producing, unchanged, into the early 1970's. It's the first one of these I'd ever seen in a larger frame size, and I had to have it (I drove 25 miles and payed $80).
Even the main tubes are actually a mix of English and French diameters, and the seatpost is an odd 25.6mm diameter that I was surprised to be able to buy easily off of Amazon.
I even had to file/sand a 3cm-longer (English, 22.2mm) stem's quill to fit the very thick-walled (French ID) steerer tube, and further had to then increase the handlebar width to keep the steering neutral on steep climbs and sprints.
Weight at 29 pounds now with alloy rims as shown, no surprise when one considers that the flattened stays appear to be electric-welded to the plate-style dropouts and the frame tubing is tagged only as "precision steel":

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8087/8...4e22f069_z.jpg

I never heard of proprietory austrian headsets on racing bikes of that era. I know Sheldon Brown mentions that size, but i recon it is more found on some 1930ies Steyr Waffenrad. On a 1970/80 race bike - nope.

According to a contemporary catalogue, the Puch Mistral Superleicht of 1983 came with a Campa Record one.

This website may give some hints:
http://www.company7.com/bosendorfer/ADbicycle.html

You may also want to contact the folks on bikeboard.at - main language is german but i'm sure a posting in english would be read, understood, and answered.

Might THIS headset work?
https://www.treatland.tv/puch-maxi-f...arings-set.htm

Hot damn, that might just work! Never would have thought of looking at moped part supply sites. Only thing is the photo doesn't show a locknut, which is the part I need the most! I sent them an email inquiry just now, and since they're local(!) I plan to stop by today as well. Thanks so much, RubberLegs.

Hope it works! You never know when you push around searches in Google... Swiss thread, Puch, Bearings, Headset....

My early 80's Puch Luzern was originally equipped with an Austrian headset that I managed to brinell. My solution was replacing the fork with a chromed Cinelli Super Corsa and the headset with a Campy Athena. The cups pressed into the frame with no problems and I'm pretty pleased by the way it looks and handles.

http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i2...3/DSC00537.jpg

The Puch moped headset cups and threaded cone should work, they look to have the very same 14-ball retainers and thin pressed cups.
Even the threaded cone looks the same to me.
Mopeds often use a triple-clamp style fork, so the locknut isn't so much part of the headset I guess?

I believe that if you use Loctite on clean threads, that both the threaded cone and locknut will absolutely stay tight.

I've raced many seasons on a bike with the threaded cone Loctited so I could lower the stem fully down to the steerer (cut flush with the threaded cone), and it has never loosened.
I've also repaired MTB race bikes for others that had the steerer threads looking torn off by a damaged die, and with Loctite the repair held up to extremely hard service indefinitely.

High-end bikes are the first ones to be updated on a factory's assembly lines, while lower-spec models may persist with old-standard geometry and dimensions, including threading, for many years.
The high-end bike needs to be compatible with contemporary high-end parts after all, whereas the lower model's components were more likely in-house made or locally sourced in those days.

Nice find! For that price I might have to get one as a spare since I currently have 2 nice AD bikes in the fleet. Great bikes but the headset is truly one-of-a-kind.

The issue seems to be solved, nevertheless: I asked a few german and austrian friends. It seems east-german bikes (Diamant, MIFA) had 26mm threaded headsets, too.
There are new headsets available at shops like these:
http://www.onlinefahrradshop.de/xtco...mant-Mifa.html

look a bit rough, though.

Might seem sacrilegious to strip but there's many decent mid-50's to 70's Steyr Puch - Austrian made middleweight Sears bikes available + or - $100. Bargain rides, I was able to salvage a late '50 Clubman from junk and sold off the donor.

I've been remiss, I'm afraid, in reporting back. As it turns out, moped headsets don't include locknuts (as was conjectured above). Still, I ended up buying one from the supply shop suggested in SF since it was local and cheap. I figure at the very least it'll solve the issue of the off-kilter adjustable race. For now, though, since the work-around that I had hit on previously (running the old headset without a spacer, with the locknut lightly tightened) seems to be working just fine, we've decided to leave well enough alone until it becomes a problem (i.e. locknut and/or adjustable race loosens). I also took the step of filing down the top of the old adjustable race so that the locknut lies more flush atop it. If that doesn't hold, we'll probably replace the headset with what we've got, using some Locktite on the steerer tube.

Still, it's great to know that there's a Plan C: ordering a full headset from Germany. Great detective-work, martl. I really appreciate the help! In fact, that goes for everyone. When I first posted on this issue, I was all but hopeless. Hard to believe how much help I've gotten! Here are a few shots of the complete bike (more on my blog):

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2814/1...7ffb725e_b.jpg
IMG_0794 by a. rosario, on Flickr
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3699/1...5129310b_b.jpg
IMG_0796 by a. rosario, on Flickr
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3682/1...c70c36a9_b.jpg
IMG_0807 by a. rosario, on Flickr