Originally Posted by
JehD
I’m surprised that Electra finally went away from the old standby 1 piece crank after all these years. The square taper still should give you a ton of options and I have read you can put an 8 speed freewheel on the original wheel.
While much of Electra's line do have one-piece cranks, I think the Townie series has always used a threaded standard 1.37 68 mm bottom bracket. My wife's 2004 3-speed Townie has a threaded BB shell, as I changed the crank to a 32 front (originally 44) and the rear to a narrow Nexus 7 (she wanted 7 speeds, but the bike HAD to be red, so it was time to swap cranks and build wheels to make wife happy.)