So what is so special about them? I happen to notice they get like 50 bucks on fleybay for them, I have one on some older steel wheel that came of the Mercier I am restoring. ( 14 - 26) I like to take it off and give it a clean up.

Funny that I mentioned this just the other day, or was it yesterday?

Basically, when these turn up with a desired spread of ratios (14-16-19-22-26t was one of their common offerings), and further that you need a 5-speed, French-threaded freewheel, the Cyclo64 is a best bet in part because they shift so reliably using modern 7-8sp-width chain.

Many of the other freewheel brands out of Italy and France don't engage modern chain so well and allow slippage or "false neutral" which is a most great detractor to a sporting bike ride.

There is nothing really special about these that I can tell there just a basic 5 speed freewheel that came on a lot of pretty basic bikes stock. I think a lot of the ebay price may because they are rare compared to other 5 speed freewheels. They haven't been made for 40 years and almost no botheered to save keep these.

They may look like any other freewheel on the outside, but they are very different on the inside.



On every other freewheel the pawls are mounted on the inside body and the ratchet teeth part of the inside of the outer body, a Cyclo 64 has this reversed.





The other unique feature is that the three largest cogs thread on from the back, and the two smallest cogs do not thread off and are permanent.



Finally, the pawls are controlled by a tiny coil spring. Every other freewheel I've worked on has either a flat brass leaf spring, a wire compression spring, or a wire push spring.



It was a real pain in the _ _ _ to reassemble this bugger. But IIRC, sailorbenjamin suggested using a magnet and it did the trick.

That's pretty cool, and I didn't need to go past those shims when I worked on mine.

I'm glad that I didn't need to change any of the sprockets, either!

Again, the appeal with these, firstly, is that they are available French-threaded.

For owners of earlier French bikes with original hubs, the French threading can be a pain.

Of course some folks put English freewheels on French-threaded hubs, and many do get away with it.

The pictured Cyclo64 freewheel can be a very useful part to have around, hence the high prices.

Thanks, Bob, for posting those pic's.

...some reference I read once (Sutherland's maybe ?) called this a "Class 2" fit. which I interpreted as "works, mostly, but is kinda declasse'."

Speaking of French freewheels, I'm waiting for this to arrive.



I traded service and regearing on two NOS Suntour New Winners for this Simplex freewheel. I had never seen one before the fellow C&Ver sent me a picture. At first I thought it might be a Cyclo re-branded as a Simplex, but as you can see, they are different. When I first searched ebay only two active ones were listed, one a 4 speed, and the other a NOS for $$$ from our "good" friends at pbBikes.

Now, after searching completed sales, I'm guessing it is a re-branded Regina, but with some doubts. Take a look at this one which I believe is the same. On the back it is marked as "Made in Italy."





And the cogs look suspiciously like Regina Oro cogs. But--- the Regina Oro, Corsa, etc. bodies, just don't match this Simplex. Those are 4 speed bodies that have the smallest cog threaded into the second cog to make them into 5 (or 6) speed freewheels.



So, any thoughts on the Simplex freewheels?

i saw a simplex freewheel sell for a surprisingly high price on eBay the other day, might have been the one you bought. up to that point I had no idea they made freewheels.

Speaking of french freewheels again, how about a Merveille? Has anyone seen one of these before besides in the threads I posted in the last couple of years?

Cool stuff Bob. I guess there was a time when several Simplex items were made in Italy. Someone here can tell us, I'm sure.

The Cycle 72 I have is just like the one in Bob's pictures except only the smallest cog is permanent. The 4th cog comes off the back as well.

That freewheel is so old and so French that they didn't even bother to stamp the threading standard into the body.

These freewheels are antiques, all I can say.

Isn't everything we're interested in?

Actually, Sutherland's calls it a class "C" fit: "difference in thread pitch makes this combination unacceptable."


Source: Sutherland's 4th Edition

out of production for 50+ YEARS ?

I had a cyclo machined 3 cog cluster to plug onto my AW3 hub , I got when JFK was still breathing.

One thing about references to the reliability of Engl/Ital or this French/Engl combination is that there can be really huge differences in the torque placed on different bike's freewheels.

There's rider weight, strength, type of riding, terrain of riding, and especially gearing, all come together to determine how much torque is put on a freewheel.

The French threads are different pitch than the others, meaning that as max load is applied, the thread spiral gets attacked in two or so places along the spiral where a peak of contact strain occurs, resulting in a continuous yielding (not necessarily a shearing failure) along considerable lengths the thread's spiral.
Depending on the hub's alloy, whether it can sustain stress after being severely yielded/deformed along those couple of locations along the thread's spiral, a broader line of torque-transmitting load contact can be established with the freewheel's inner hub.
Jan Heine documents riders of a tandem who have successfully used an Englishg freewheel on a French-threaded hub, and I'm near-certain that I ridden at least a couple of bikeswith this inadvertent mis-match.

I have witnessed the malleability of an aluminum hubshell's threads, such that a French freewheel, forced onto an English hub, produced threads seemingly more French than English.

And to think that some folks worry about an English-threaded freewheel on an Italian hub, where only the angle of the thread peaks is a bit different, ...and that with standard road gearing(?).
Perhaps the degree of weakness in any thread mis-match comes down to the unpredictable variability of dimensional tolerances and material properties of various maker's hub and freewheel threads, in addition to the thread mis-match itself.

A similar concern of mine, which similarly might also merit some potentially-destructive endurance-testing, would be the case where you ran English pedal taps thru a French-threaded crankarm and then subsequently torqued in a French-threaded pedal. Anyone tried that? If not, I'll be on the lookout for a suitable, low-end or otherwise damaged or orphaned French crankarm, and give my Lyotard pedals a heave using a large pedal wrench. Likely I will start such testing by just heaving a French-threaded pedal axle into an old, discarded Japanese crankarm, to see if I can strip it.

That's some responses guys, learned a lot actually, will hold on to it but wont take it apart...

...or send it to me to service.

I recently came into a Mavic 501 wheelset, french threaded, with no freewheel. I was shocked at the prices of french freewheels, until I learned that the french don't call them freewheels. Try searching ebay.fr for "roue libre". ta da. this applies to many other components, where is helps to know the correct description in the country of origin.

...thanks, John, my bad. This might be a good place to mention that freewheel threading
and BB threading are same size, so keeping a set of French, Italian, and RH Standard BB cups
around gives you a kinda test gauge in case you have a question about one.

Probably a lot of you guys already know this, but maybe a few don't.

So how does an ISO-threaded freewheel differ from an English-threaded one? The Sutherland's table perhaps implies that ISO has a thread pitch between those of English and Italian, which both otherwise have the same callout diameter and the same number of threads per inch.

I don't know about the rest of you, but my favorite freewheel size, 14-26, seems very hard to find these days, and 13-26 is not that much easier to find. With a 42T inner chainring (minimum size for a 144mm BCD, with the rare and expensive exception of a 41T ring), 24T gives me too high a bottom gear, and 28T doesn't get along with my SunTour Cyclone and Campagnolo NR and 980 derailleurs.

Since the smallest cogs often wear out first, particularly among shiftless riders who use small-small crosschain out of ignorance or laziness, making these non-removable is a particularly poor bit of engineering. On the older Reginas, the large cogs are left-threaded off the back side, and the small cogs are right-threaded off the front side. The Japanese revolutionized everything by using the now-familiar spline system for the larger cogs (and eventually all cogs or all but the smallest, in most modern freehub cassette systems).

I've been told that the sweet spot for C&V freewheels are 6 speed models in this range (13-26 or 14-26). I do have a few that fall into this range and a few 5 speed models as well. Just yesterday I sent a very sweet 6 speed Regina Oro to our fellow C&Ver in the Navy who is stationed in Sicily, Italy. It is 14-26. I hope it serves him well.

Apparently, just a tiny difference in diameter:


Source: Sutherland's 6th Edition

The bigger problem is the thread pitch, which as I mentioned puts all of the stress on just a couple of short lengths of the thread spiral along it's 1 meter of approximate length.

Then, under heavier torque, the stressed short portions of the threading yield, thus spreading the loading over much greater lengths of the 1 meter or so of total thread length.

At some level of torque there will be a moving point of failure along the thread spiral, such that the most-deformed sections of threading will yield entirely. This yielding is accelerated by any diameter mis-match which would force the stress out toward the narrow peaks of the thread spiral, thus further reducing the torque capacity when it is an English or Italian-threaded freewheel being tightened onto a French-threaded hub.
However, when making actual diameter measurements, surprise number one, you may be hard-pressed to discern such diameter differences even when using a good digital caliper. Go figure. So you can't reliably tell the threading standard by measuring the diameter.

One should carefully inspect hub threading visually for thread distortions before concluding that there is a thread match with any particular freewheel threading, since often freewheels have been forced onto the wrong hub, thus altering the hub's thread pitch.
And in the case of an English or Italian-threaded freewheel installed onto a French-threaded hub, this forced installation can require relatively little force, often occurring within just the last 2-4 turns.