That suggests the noise you mention is maybe caused by the clutch slipping in and out of engagement, or that the planet cage was moving about and forcing the clutch to do the same because of misalignment with the fixed pinion. The clutch is connected to the indicator chain by a sort of T piece that pulls the clutch in and out with an internal spring pushing it and the gear change wire, pulling it out.
Ah that's great then. By the way, Jur mentioned cone adjustment too, I wasn't the only one.

I saw instructions about this hub, warning not to let the left hand cone run out of adjustment because of the potential to cause internal damage. The functioning of the hub depends on the correct positioning of the internals so that the stationary central pinion is in the right place. Hopefully, you didn't persist in riding it while it was making these noises and grinding something away inside, in which case, you will probably get many years of good service from it.

i'm going to have to try adjusting my cones now... 2nd gear is disengaging on me once i start pedaling into it... 1st gear is fine, and 3rd gear slips out right away... undoubtedly this is my fault as i took out the factory spacers and replaced them with washers to fit the hub into a narrower dropout, and in the process i had to undo/refit the inner locknuts, which surely fudged the factory cone settings.

That doesn't sound right at all to me rekall. It is certainly advisable to slack off on the pedalling when changing down, but if you have bad noises, there is something wrong - hopefully only an adjustment problem. The only time I ever had noises from my hub was when the cable was maladjusted. It was more a feel than a noise, a sort of 'graunching which I believe was caused by the hub not having cleanly switched between second and top. Maybe this is what is happening to yours.

Are you sure that the cable is free and properly adjusted? It may be what you suggest, but also the smooth operation and correct adjustment of the cable will allow more reliable gear selection and no jumping gears.

Hah! I get the cigar! I hope this solved it once and for all.

right on both accounts EvilV (though i'd done both things earlier this week before your reply )

i took my wheel off and loosened my inner locknuts (the ones holding the spacers to the cones) to finger-tight, put the wheel back on and then no more awful grindage.

i went out for a test ride after that and was getting weird shifting behavior... 2nd was actually 3rd, 1st was never quite engaging, if i held the downshift for a while i would get something actually lower than 1st gear (felt like 50% ratio).

futzed with the indicator assembly a bunch but didn't quite get it myself so i rode carefully down to a bike shop and they got it set up proper... the guy basically did the same thing i was doing, lengthening/shortening the cable a bit with the cable attachment nuts near the indicator while upshifting/downshifting a few times, but he also adjusted the locknuts where the cable meets the 'rail', as well as the plastic nut up by the shifter itself.

right out of the shop i cruised easily through all three speeds and they 'feel' right now.
hooray!

Glad to hear your problems are gone. This hub SRF3 has been great for me. Very reliable and once you know how to adjust it, I doubt it will give you any kind of problem for a very long time. You do need to know how to adjust it right though, because if you ever have a puncture that needs the wheel to come off (I usually try and fix them with the wheel on) you will need to set up the gear adjustment again.

This is how I do it:

1. set the twist grip into top gear
2. connect the indicator chain and adjust it so that it is JUST very SLIGHTLY slack - just a tiny amount of play
3. with the bike upside down on a table or on a work stand, pedal it around and change the gears to see if they are all available.
4. the only one you might have touble with is low gear - in which case tighten slightly until you get it
5. If you had to do step 4, check again that you can still get top

Top gear - the little chain is only just slack - a tiny bit and that's all. Low gear, the chain is fully pulled out, but not so tight that the cable is stretched.

thought it was all good and then it wasn't engaging 3rd gear at all... and 1st gear was such that i would have to hold down the downshift lever during initial coast and a then a few turns of the pedal, and then after a while it would upshift to 2nd all by itself. strange behavior.

took it in to have it looked at and professional help was stumped as well even after an hour of futzing with the cones and locknuts and indicator chain...

later that day i fitted a 30T sprocket i wanted to try out (thinking that the lower ratio would help with steep hills) and yikes the problem was EVEN WORSE... now it was in 1st gear all the time, and with 30 teeth it turned a casual night out to see some local bands into an exhausting amount of pedaling there and then home.

so next day i bought a flat wrench to fit the cones, and was determined to learn how to adjust the cones myself. i took the wheel off, loosened the locknuts to free up the cones on both the drive and non-drive sides, loosened the non-drive cone all the way out and then back in to just finger-tight... did the same for the drive-side and then tightened both just a tiny little bit each until i got to the point where the wheel was moving freely in both directions.

basically, i approached the adjustment as i would my bottom bracket - you want the cones to be snug (so your wheel doesn't wobble, and so the pawls get their necessary tension), but you want the wheel to move freely.

learned three things in the process. 1) if you tighten the cones too much it will greatly effect how tight/loose your chain moves when coasting and backpedaling. 2) depending on your cone adjustment, when you hold the axle in your fingertips and move the wheel in reverse to simulate backpedaling, you will hear the hub click a couple of times per rotation. 3) i now believe that the size of your chainring/sprocket will vastly improve or worsen the hub's ability to shift gears and stay in gear.

i don't know if the clicking while backpedaling in 3rd gear is normal or not but considering that i'm able to get 3rd gear whereas before i wasn't, i believe this behavior is by design... to me it makes sense, because the same "click" is what i see and hear when shifting through the other gears, but in 3rd there's no more chain positions to be 'found' so it clicks and then remains slightly slack as opposed to clicking down to 2nd or 1st...

backpedaling in 2nd or 1st, no click, just while in 3rd.

about #3 - as i said, with a 40T or 30T sprocket i was having all these problems. now with a 48T on my mongoose 20" frame, i was FINALLY able to feel the rush of speed in 3rd gear i had been hoping for all this time... it's almost as if the SRF3 needs to feel a specific amount of 'oomph' being applied to the pedals/chain/cog to get in gear and stay in gear.

p.s. if you want to fit a 48T sprocket on a bmx frame, be prepared to do some hammering... i spent upwards of an hour hammering a 'dimple' into where the chainring was rubbing up against the drive-side dropout arm.

i'd also like to add that if you're removing the spacers to make the hub fit a narrower frame, that you should still use them on the outside (in this order: dropout, spacer, cable guide, locknut) so that the indicator chain pulley maintains the same distance to the inside of the hub... i think this was the biggest factor in finally getting things working.

I think your cable is sticking and that it is too slack. If excessive force is required to engage first gear, the cable is too slack. The fact that when you relaxed the grip on the changer it swapped to second only confirms this.

I'd have to say that this kind of behaviour is not at all typical of the SRF3. Usually, they are robust, straightforward and reliable.

It is a bad idea to dismantle the hub or alter the arrangements of the cones or any other part of a device like this without good reason and a sound understanding of how it is supposed to work. The so called 'professional help' doesn't not sound that professional either. It is a fact that many cycle repair places never see a hub like this from one year to the next. The manual tells how it MUST be put together and one MUST really stick to that. The advice to turn the left cone up finger tight and then back it off half a turn is based on many decades of use with millions of these units. It should be taken seriously.

Some of the behaviour that reckall describes sounds like it may be caused by a sticking gear cable ( delayed shifts for example). When the clutch is moved, the gear MUST change. If it changes some time later in the required direction, this suggests that the twist grip movement was not being transferred to the hub internals. The likely explanation for this is that the cable is sticking or is maladjusted. If the cause is a sticking cable the problem would probably only happen when the gears were being changed from low to high gears since this requires that the little spring inside the hub, push the clutch inwards and drag the slack cable with it. If the cable was sticking, the spring might take time to accomplish this move, or maybe not achieve it at all. Changing down to low gears would work almost always since there is a relatively large amount of force available from the rider's wrist. If you can't engage the low gears progressively down to first, (where all that wrist power is available) then the cable adjustment is wrong and the cable is not pulling the clutch far enough out of the hub.

To check for cable sticking, disconnect the cable at the indicator chain from the adjuster and with some help (you may not have the arm span to do it easily yourself) work the twist grip and pull the cable back at the gear end with finger pressure. It should move smoothly and easily both ways. There should be no strong drag at all.

Once the cable is seen to be free and easy, attach the indicator chain and adjust the slack on the cable with the twist grip set in third gear. Adjust it until the indicator chain is JUST A LITTLE SLACK - not sloppy and not tight. Then check that the bike is actually in third gear.

Now move the twist grip to first gear and see if first is engaged. This is easily done with the bike on a stand or upside down on a table, because you need to work the pedals around by hand and have the rear wheel spinning. It can be done upside down on the ground, but in this case you will be hunched up trying to pedal the bike with your hand. If the cable adjustment is correct, all gears will be there. If first does not engage, make small adjustments to tighten the cable. This will be more easily done if you temporarily set the twist grip to third gear and having made a small adjustment, set it back to first. The cable adjustment will be found to be quite precise, and when set right, lock up the little lock nut on the indicator chain. It should go for hundreds of miles without intervention, usually only needing attention when the wheel has been removed.

It could be that a minor cable fault has been compounded by fiddling with the cones and internals so that an originally straightforward problem has been made more complicated. All the references to Sturmy Archer three speed problems say that the usual causes are cable related.

The old British ones - like on my 1962 Raleigh - were bulletproof. My original Swift folder (before I converted to ss) came with a 3-speed hub and a Sturmey-Archer - yeah right, in name only - trigger shifter. The trigger shifter lasted a whole few days before it broke apart into little pieces.

as it turns out the root of them problem was something i did very wrong from the get-go when fitting the hub to a narrow dropout ('bmx standard' 110mm), which, is quite possible if you remove the factory-installed spacers between the cone and inner locknut on each side... however, when i did this during my initial build, i hadn't seen the most recent version of the user manual for the SRF3 (the tiny printed manual in the box differed from the one sturmey's got online) which cautions very strongly "under no circumstances must the cone be unscrewed more than 5/8 of a turn as this could adversely affect the gear alignment." thinking back, i had no knowledge of what the 'cones' even were until things weren't operating as expected, and i definitely remember turning both the cones together with the locknuts when getting the locknuts off the axle to remove the spacers... i didn't recognize the cones as something that needed to 'stay put' (with a right-sized flat wrench) while i was doing that... and then there's the other major word of caution offered by sturmey -- "the hub must not be ridden out of adjustment as this may damage the internal parts and cause the hub to malfunction"... so yeah, i failed on both accounts. the hub is in the shop getting overhauled... when my friendly mechanic took it apart to inspect what had happened, some broken metal bits fell out. costing me $30 plus labor to replace the broken internals but it's not the end of the world. lesson learned RTFM!! (even if you have to hunt down the most recent/more comprehensive manual first.) i'm just bummed that i did finally get it sort-of functional before the realization that the iffy shifting was due to damage i'd done myself to the internals. oh well.

Let us know how this pans out rekall. Maybe you should change your nick to 'Wreck All' - LOL - Come to think of it, that nick would suit me quite well too. I've wrecked plenty of stuff including engines from ill-advised messing about.

I have some beauties in my wrecking ball too. Take me a while to remember them all... a certain washing machine mechanical computer comes to mind as example...

peter at the trophy bike garage expertly replaced the pawl springs, driver assembly, sprocket dustcap, and a few of the other parts that got buggered up due to my carelessness... only ordered the parts that needed replacing for less cash than a complete set of pre-assembled internals would have run me... dude knows his stuff!

shifting is perfect now and i'm really thoroughly enjoying 1st gear on hills and 3rd gear on level streets. world of difference!

just an update to say that things are holding up 100% since the overhaul.
woohoo!