wesmamyke

We ran into an annoyance with a particular hub motor, in that you couldn't use any commonly available freewheel tool. It did come off, and was replaced with some effort.

I'm curious though, is anyone selling an extremely thin walled shimano FW tool, that would fit over almost any power cable a motor might have?

andychrist

Do you mean freewheel or cassette? Because your saying “replaced with some effort” sounds more to me like a cassette, as freewheels simply screw right in and are tightened when pedaling — just are a b¡tch to remove without the tool.

The hub motor compatible lock ring tools are everywhere. Problem is they are uniformly described as “Bike Rear Cassette Cog Remover Cycle Repair Tool Freewheel Socket Fit Shimano...” although as far as I can tell are just for cassettes. So if you search for a freewheel specific tool you’ll be lead to this imposter.

wesmamyke

I do mean freewheel, not cassette. This particular one you could not remove the axle nut, I suspect the way it was intended to be serviced involved pulling the motor side cover, on this model that was on the drive side.

The issue I think comes from it using a smaller axle. Other hub motors I've had to service had a larger axle with flats to allow it to fit in a standard dropout. So the resulting much larger axle nut has a very large hole that will fit over the power cable.

Now the power cable was also a problem with the tool we have, but the axle nut was the larger issue. I'm not sure any tool would have actually fit over it. There is an odd plier type tool that might work, but a similar problem with terrible product descriptions and bad pictures make ordering one a slight gamble.