jrupe

High Pastor Bob,

This post was super helpful and you are very clear about the 14T small sprocket limitation for a Perfect. I have two Perfects, one I added a 34T and rearranged to put on an '82 Trek 412. Now I have an old Panda (more of an early BMX company) road bike. It's was so heavy when I bought that I was immediately thinking 1X. My plan is to swap out the drivetrain with Apex cranks with a single 28T chainring, and in the back I have another 34T splined for my extra Perfect, but I was really hoping to get a 12T or 13T sprocket on there if possible. My plan for the Panda is to throw racks on it and use it to get to the beach with my surfboard and to make grocery runs.

Basically, I'm able to get the low gearing I want for a cargo bike 28/34, but was hoping to get the high gearing a little higher than the 28/14 the Perfect is currently set up for. I was about to buy New Winner 12T and 17T threaded sprockets to create a 12 - 34, but I'm glad I did a little research because it seems this might not work the way I'd hoped. Is there any work around or advice for getting a sub 14T cog onto a Perfect freewheel?

Apologies ahead of time if this is a dumb question, just thought I'd ask anyway and you seem like an expert!

Thanks, John

smontanaro 

Reviving an old thread, I have a New Winner Ultra-6 freewheel (13-14-15-17-19-21) and a normally spaced α freewheel (13-15-17-19-21-24). Can I use cogs from the α to make a slightly wider range New Winner? I've seen lots of mention of Pro Compe, Winner and New Winner, but never see any mention of the α (four notch body, FWIW). Does it correspond to one of the other common SunTour freewheels, maybe just a name change to make it "new and improved?"

steelbikeguy

weren't the Alpha freewheels just ones designed to have consistent spacing between the cogs in order to make them suitable for indexing?

In any case.. it really depends on what cogs you've got in total, and what you will need for the final configuration.
To some degree, knowing that you have an A21, an A19, an R17, a T15, a T14, and a S13 would be a start (which is probably what your Ultra 6 is), along with knowing the Alpha freewheel cogs too.
To complicate things a bit, SunTour used the same letter designation for distinctly different cogs, which took me a while to figure out. ID size, spline vs threads, # of splines, and even flange thickness can vary.
Feel free to PM or e-mail if you want to follow up off-line.

Steve in Peoria

smontanaro 

Thanks steelbikeguy . Sounds like I'm just going to have to break down and disassemble both freewheels.

JohnDThompson 

No, due to the diameter of the thread where the smallest sprocket attaches to the body, 14T is the smallest sprocket that will fit on a "Perfect" body. You could conceivably braze a smaller sprocket onto the 14T sprocket and attach the pair as a unit (assuming you have appropriately wide hub spacing and clearances), but you'd be on your own doing that.

Charles Wahl

For the sake of completeness, there's this



And Sutherland's 4th goes into some detail on the topic, pp. 4-9 through 4-15. I have a PDF if anyone wants it; just email me.

steelbikeguy

that's an important first step! I've got a couple of corncob Winners that have small cogs that refuse to spin off. They've resisted the coaxing from penetrating oil and the torquing of chain whips with cheater bars. Fortunately, I haven't needed a corncob in a while.

Steve in Peoria

smontanaro 

Mind if I add your scans to this Flickr album? I have Sutherland's 4ed just to my left as I type this. Will check it out.

Freewheel Spacing/Cog Info

I disassembled to New Winner. The first four were threaded and the last two splined (two different diameters as I'm sure everybody else knows). I took off the small cog on the α and immediately saw its cogs weren't going to be of any use to me. The other five cogs were splined, but not in manner compatible with the New Winner:



The story has a happy ending though. I was tidying up the mess that is my workbench and stumbled on a normally spaced New Winner six-speed I'd forgotten I had (hiding in a yogurt container to catch any drips of oil) with the desired range. (we need :banana: guy)

steelbikeguy

everyone loves a story with a happy ending!!

back to the Alpha freewheel... the body looks quite a bit like the last generation Winner (which I used to think was the Winner Pro, but I'm not sure that some weren't also called Winner).
Here's a shot of one of my 4 slot Winner's, with what appears to be the same arrangement of splines for the mid-range sprockets.



I don't recall any cog boards for this family of sprockets, so perhaps there's not much of a stash of spare sprockets with the large number of splines.

Steve in Peoria

dddd

The Alpha freewheel teeth were improved over the earlier non-indexed cogs.
There is a bevel on the right-facing side of each tooth, toward the driven edge of each tooth.
I've found that I can add this simple bevel to the teeth on any earlier cog using a bench grinder. It half-way simulates Shimano's twisted tooth tips.

My preferred home-spun method of home-spun Ultra-6 freewheel is to take a 7s Dura-Ace or Sante 7s freewheel and simply remove the smallest (externally-threaded) cog.
This leaves a gap exposing the bearings that can be filled and sealed with an appropriate O-ring.

As far as the step between large-diameter and smaller-diameter cog mounting positions, I have created an ultra-5 freewheel for use with an early-50's 4s derailer by cutting the step down using grinding tools. The resulting step was not accurate enough to position the cogs in-plane, so I just under-cut (over-cut?) the step and had the four splined cogs all stacked without any support of the central step. The threaded cog held it all in compression. The cut-down area was left spline-less and surrounded only by one of the 7s spacers.

Charles Wahl

No problem. I can't remember where I got those. Yellow Jersey? Bike Forums?

smontanaro 

I cracked open the two six-speed New Winner freewheels today. Catching people up, one was a wide-spaced 13-24, the other an Ultra-spaced 13-21. I wanted an Ultra-spaced 13-24. As I understand from the earlier discussion, only the spacers should differ between the wide and narrow versions. The cogs are the same. Here's what I saw when I got things disassembled (top row wide - note the siamesed 13T/15T cog):



Note also that though the two freewheel bodies are New Winners, the body from the wide-spaced freewheel has a decidedly different look in the splined cog section, extra wide notches between those for the cog splines:



Not sure what that's all about.

I started dropping cogs from the upper row in the first photo interspersed with spacers from the second row (using the body from the Ultra-6 freewheel). When I spun on the third cog, I noticed the splined cogs were loose. The splines and notches weren't an issue, but I think the spacer between the 21T and 19T cog wasn't thick enough to allow the 19T cog to hold the 21T and 24T cogs tightly in place. I will go back and try using the other NWN body to see if the situation improves, but it seems that in addition to a suitable collection of cogs, one also needs a suitable collection of spacers to properly assemble these freewheels. Can someone confirm or refute that supposition?

smontanaro 

Et voila! The spacing between the 15T and 17T cogs is a bit wide, placing the overall cog width (inside of large cog to outside of small cog) at about 27.3mm. I believe that's supposed to be more like 26.5mm. Still, there was enough room to squeeze it in on my ItalVega instead of the old 5sp Reginas (14-22 or 14-28). As was to be expected, the remaining cogs, spacers and freewheel body don't add up to a usable freewheel. Hopefully this cobbled together freewheel is an improvement over the Reginas. I might try dddd 's idea of grinding the tooth profiles. Is that every tooth like the twists on Uniglide cogs, or slightly more elaborate like Hyperglide?

steelbikeguy

It's not a functional difference. It does save a bit of material and therefore weight. I have found myself forgetting which set of slots the sprocket's spline is supposed to fit into, though.

indeed!
Until you start messing around with these things, it's hard to fully appreciate the variety of spacers required to assemble all the versions of the New Winners. It does make you start to appreciate how simple the Perfects and Pro Compes were! It also teaches you to look at that cog board schematic and pay attention to the spacer thickness, diameter, and profile.
My collection of cogs is much larger than my collection of spacers, although both seem to have an abundance of some types and scarcity of others.

Steve in Peoria