Funny, I just wrote him and asked about those plans. He said that it has been done successfully. It will be a spring project for me.

Regarding the mechanical friction losses. Yes there must be some. I mated a sturmey archer aw to a mavic ma2 on the back of my old early 80s kuwahara. I could not believe the feeling of increased smoothness and efficiency compared to the shimano 600 derailers that I removed. The hub weighs about two pounds but is a wash with the removal of all the other crap. I ride mostly in the middle gear which is the 1:1 giving me 42/18 gearing using a 1/8th chain from the raleigh.
I love scrounging and playing with things mechanical.

Campy made this scary thing ca 1940.....The axle nut was loosened with one handle and the chain was forced to the other cog using the second handle .... All while riding!!!! From campyonly.com:


The sliding hub, dual rod operated, back pedal derailleur is patented on May 4th and introduced in August. The pieces of the derailleur are all handmade requiring a massive investment of time and labor.

Jim

I think it is because he converted a cassette hub to ss usage, the furthest cog actually works as a lock ring so the spacers and cog stay put.

Awesome! I love the old skool Campy QR (indeed Campagnolo invented QR--myth has it that he realized it after his nuts were frozen(!) crossing the Alps and couldn't switch to his other gear), too.

But for the record, those weren't my words.

If you can find an old 3-speed hub cheap, it's fun to take apart. They use a clever trick to provide 3-speeds with a single planetary set.... the 5-speed has only 2 and the 7-speed has 3. They use a secondary clutch and it can be a head scratcher until you play with it for awhile. BTW, both S-A and SRAM use the same trick and are pretty much the same inside so if you learn one, the other is easy beans.

Jim

Maybe I'll do that. One of LBS's I frequent has an old skooly SA cutaway AW, but in the 15 minutes I spent dorking around with it, I didn't get it. I have an old Raleigh Sports (sans front wheel) and was going to build some sort of winter frankenbike around the rear, but the budget's tight at the moment. Maybe I should fiddle with it instead.

lamo.

you'd still have to loosen up the rear wheel to get the chain off one cog and onto the other. unless you had a ridiculously slack chain.

samo?

531 is 'old crap steel'********** come here so my bike can ***** slap you you ****!
:eek:

I dunno - I think you could pull it off with a minimum of slack. Imagine if you had 43 x 15 and 42 x 16. When it was on 42 x 16, you would push the chain, while turning the crank, onto the 15-tooth cog, thus creating more slack, which you would then take up by pushing it onto the larger front ring. I think that so long as you did it in the right order, you could accomplish this within the normal amount of slack you want to keep your chain from binding up.

Of course, I have neither the resources nor the inclination to try this, since one speed is fine with me...

This is not a new idea, it's been done before many years ago for track riders using the same bike for different events....

What's so Zen about a fixed gear? The sound of one gear shifting??

[To shift from one cog to another]

Yes, but it is easier and cleaner to do it that way than to remove the wheel and flip it around.

people outside of kansas?

Now that is zen :eek: It should be in the top snippets of this forum whether he meant to be sage or not.

interesting idea, but why? as mentioned before a fixed gear hub with gears already exists. its just another gimick…