Ged117 

I'll post some pics of the '59 Raleigh Canadian tomorrow. I am thinking that some evaporust + boiled linseed oil afterward could bring some life back to the paint. I'm calling it my Rustomod Raleigh project.

As bought:

PXL_20230308_013845246
PXL_20230308_014151381.MP
PXL_20230308_013828607

Yes, that is a pencil sticking out of the oil fill hole...a very old pencil! The farmer told me that his father bought the bike in Ottawa new in 1959, for riding to and from the township nearby. The farmer rode it later on when he was taller. It was hanging just inside the open wall of the barn from about 1975 (his guess) until I took it off the peg. I was planning on just grabbing the hub when I got this bike, but I think it still has something to offer. The hub is actually a mess, really beat. No matter, I've just finished rebuilding a '53 AW, so this Rustomod Raleigh is going to get that hub instead. Not sure on rims as yet, maybe I'll ask around the regulars here for suggestions.

cudak888 another three-speed project in my hands! and its green - well, barely.

vintagebicycle

I actually have a few choices for rims and tires, I have a set of 700x35c tires on some wider Weinmann rims from the same period. I think I may have another set of tires in 40mm as well.
What stopped me was that I did something similar to an old Nishiki road bike and ended up hating how it rode when I was done, but I left the 27x1 1/4" rims and tires and used a Nexus 7 speed rear hub. The upright bars, new wider saddle, and grip shifter just didn't work well and I broke it up and used the parts elsewhere.
The road bike frame had a ton of flex in it and it was very noticeable when riding. I could watch the frame move left and right with every turn of the cranks.
It was also a similar sized frame as well. I'm older now, and while I've not gotten any shorter, I seem to like a 23" frame with a bit more seat post height over the larger frame. The smaller frame is also more rigid under a larger rider.
I'm not sure what I'll do with this frame yet but for now its going to sit. I do still have enough parts to put it back to all original, including a new old set of cranks, rims, bars, and seat post..
The B17 saddle is long gone, it gave up on me 30 years ago and was replaced with a padded saddle.
I never bothered with it because even if I got through all the work to restore the bike, it still no longer fits me and it won't likely bring even the sum of its parts if I sell it. I watched a new old stock SC sit for two months on FB here go unsold at $150. He finally dropped the price to $100, and then $75 and then $50, and I grabbed it just for the new set of components.
The frame went unsold on fleabay for a year at $25. It finally dumped it for $20 locally at a yard sale.
After the pandemic, bikes here quit selling almost completely. There's been a ton of nice rides listed on FB and CL but no takers until they get down to pocket change or less.
I used to buy anything I thought was worth saving, fix it up and resell it to cover my cost, mostly as a hobby, but it got to the point where they didn't bring enough to cover my gas to go get them. Its always been a bit tough to sell bikes around here but it died completely about 3 years ago.

dirtman

Rough, crashed older Triumph on FB

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace...05928597021273


At the very least the forks are bent but the top tube looks off as well.

1989Pre 

I like the unusual brake calipers, with pads not centered, but fore and aft of the caliper arms. Forks often look askew in photos. We need a dead-on side view. It has the fluted top eyes like the Elswicks of the era.

oldspokes

It looks like both fork blades are bend back and the frame definitely looks bent to me, regardless of angle. The fender is a mess but it looks like there's not much more than a 1/2" between it and the down tube. That bike hit something hard

The calipers and pads look like those on a same era Hercules I have here.

For someone to be asking $150 for that I'd have to assume they're delusional, I don't see much that's even salvageable. The rims are badly rusted, the frame and fork are bent, the bars and stem are rust pitted, and both fenders are a mess. Its a fair condition Triumph scripted chain wheel at best, with maybe a rebuildable 1955 hub.
I've listed bikes in 50 times better condition for less and gotten zero replies, it will surprise me if that sells for more than $10 or $20,
Anything can be fixed but that would be a tough one to bring back to any sort of presentable condition assuming the fork and frame both can be straightened.

barnfind

About 20 years ago that frame would be a fairly hot item but lately it seems no one wants the better bikes around here. I can get more for a 40 year old Huffy or Murray than I can any shop bike.
As a whole bike, taller sells faster here. anything under 60cm is a tough sell, but parts don't sell, nor do bare frames. The buyer that I seem to find can't even put air in their own tires let alone build a bike from the ground up.
The problem is anything over 23" needs a box that falls well into the oversize category of any shipper making it nearly impossible to ship since the cost of shipping will be more than the bike is worth.
Worse yet, I sold a super clean Motobecane Grand Jubilee assembled new in the box last fall, it was listed for five years, I finally get a response on it, and a guy shows up with a dump truck full of firewood, with cash. He looked the bike over, handed over the cash and wheels the bike over to the truck, and proceeds to toss it on top of the pile like a bag of trash. As he drove away, it slid down the pile finally stopping as it wedged at the bottom of the pile of wood against the tail gate. I was sure it was going to bounce onto the road as I watched. The same day I sell a rusty 80's Columbia 10 speed for $80, the guy shows up with a mini van with a dozen blankets for it and carefully packs it in the van. It was listed for only four hours when it sold. The guy said he was going to restore it back to new condition.

I used to rebuild or at least service old bikes for resale but after 2020, the demand is gone. $20 seems to be the magic number, any more and no one even looks at it, and there's no money selling $20 bikes, nor do I want a garage full of them.

noglider 

@vintagebicycle, test the wheels and tires before you commit. That late-70s model was racier than the earlier one and may not fit wide-ish tires.

oldspokes

I had a '78 Super Course years ago with a set ofMichelin World Tour 700c x 35 tires, they were a tight fit but they didn't rub. Of course that was on the original wheels with a derailleur.
It may be different with a 3 speed hub and fenders since there will need to be room for chain adjustment.

Salubrious

I think I can provide a 40H and 32H rim set with good chrome. Yours for the cost of shipping-PM me.

Ged117 

PM sent, thanks.

Ged117 

I managed to find a stainless wheel with a hub in decent condition, so that's the rear covered.

Ged117 

For anyone interested, there's a 36h 1950 AW in good condition for sale on the auction site for a reasonable (shocker) price. 1950s hubs in 36h are rare as hen's teeth. Well, almost.

oldspokes

I would think that 36h AW hubs would be fairly common? Nearly every American brand 3 speed had one back in the days before Shimano came about.
In my pile of hubs, I've likely got more 36h hubs then 40h. models. Most came from Schwinn, Columbia, or Rollfast bikes from the 50's and 60's.

Sedgemop 

Not mine. Worth a look.

Very rare '38 Phillips - $500 (Crystal Lake)

CL IL Phillips

Here's a bike you - nor anyone else - has probably ever seen. Until I ran across this one several years ago, neither had I. An original 1938 Phillips. (Ok...original, insofar as I can tell, except I cleaned it up, respoked it, serviced it, and added new gray tires and tubes.) My very faulty memory tells me that Phillips was a big-time aftermarket supplier in England, ultimately swallowed up by Raleigh. What caught my eye originally, was the derallieur. In 1938. Now...I know nothing about derailleurs, but I like rare bikes, and I figured this qualified. Life circumstances demand I sell off my collection, and this is one of what's got to go. The pictures tell most of its condition. Good paint. Decent chrome. The bike shows very well for its age. These are the best pictures I have right now, and I hope they give you a good idea of what's going on here. There's enough left to do, that it could qualify as a winter project - rub on the paint even more, make final adjustments. I've never ridden it, because my riding days disappeared a fair while back. But everything seems to work, on the stand. There's no junk here. It's an honest bike.

barnfind

The way it works is that if you need a 40h, all you can find is 36h, and vice versa. I have four drawer cabinets full of AW hubs and shells and for some reason when I need a particular year, its never the right spoke count. Probably the same reason when you need 36 spokes in a particular size, the box on the shelf always has only 35.

From experience, I tend to find a lot of '52-59 hubs in 36h, mostly from Schwinns, which used a mix of Sturmey Archer, and Austrian made 'Schwinn Approved' clones. Then anything after '72 is almost always 36h. Prior to '52, finding an SA hub on an American bike is a bit less likely. I've found a few on Columbia bikes but can't say if they were original or just period upgrades.

arex

Here's a bit about AC-DC converters, for the purpose of driving LEDs off of a dynamo hub. Still researching how to calculate values for the various components.

SirMike1983 

The Schwinn middleweights using AW (and sometimes SW) hubs have a lot to do with the 36-hole AWs found in the US during the 1950s. Schwinn sold a fairly large number of middleweight three speed bikes in the middle and late 1950s. Schwinn also used a fairly large number of alloy shell hubs, particularly between 1953 and 1957 or so. Schwinn lightweight three speeds of that era also used the AW, but were far fewer in number than the middleweights. For a brief period Schwinn also used Brampton-made AW clones on some of the lightweights.

In the early 1950s and previously, the main user of 36 hole AW hubs were the Schwinn lightweights (with a lesser number of Columbia, Rollfast, Hiawatha, etc.]. [A "lightweight" in the US market was any "thin" tire bike like a Raleigh Sports, or similar.] These bikes were not uncommon, but also not nearly as common as the later middleweights. So while 1950s era 36-hole AWs are not at all rare in the USA, one from 1950 is somewhat uncommon because it is prior to the middleweight bikes.

Salubrious

A legit 3-speed! Raleigh did not acquire Phillips until sometime in the 1980s.

No need for the choke. The R value is of course the LED itself. You don't need to do this if you don't want to- the LED won't conduct when reverse biased, so it does flicker at low speeds but it won't be damaged, which is how I've run my lighting, although I've often thought about doing this. A larger value for the capacitor is all that's needed- 10,000uf @16v should do nicely. 16V might seem higher than needed but you don't want the cap heating up when the bike is going fast. The only tricky bit is that there is a voltage rise when the output of the rectifiers is filtered by the cap. That will likely put the resulting DC up around 7-8V. A regulator is a good idea on this account and it would sort out any flicker. The LT1084 adjustable regulator with a couple of resistors (to set its output voltage) as well as a small cap at its output would do the job nicely and I suspect would not even need a heatsink. The entire thing could fit easily inside an SA or Miller headlamp.

tcs

The official history says that Sturmey-Archer didn't build the AW in 1957. They discontinued production in 1956 in favor of the SW, but threw in the towel and restarted AW production in 1958.

So of course here's a June, 1957 alloy AW with 36 holes:



It's thought these were an OEM (Schwinn) special order, the SW having never been offered in alloy shell.

Fun fact: Since the SW was never offered in drum brake or Dynahub versions, the AW mechanism was produced continuously during these years.

SirMike1983 

Given Schwinn's high volume, they were able to dictate, to some degree, what Sturmey was producing. Schwinn did use some SW hubs along with AW hubs (I removed a SW from my 1957 Traveler and put on a 1957 AW - Schwinn was using both the AW and SW simultaneously). Schwinn preferred alloy AW hubs when they could get them (not all on the Schwinns were alloy, but a substantial portion were), along with alloy brake levers and brake calipers in the mid and late 1950s (Weinmann 810s usually).

Sturmey had a history of building hubs to order if you would order in enough volume. Sturmey had done the same thing with Sears bikes in the 1910s. The Model S was license-built in the USA during WWI for Sears bikes, particularly the Chief.

Schwinn was notoriously thrifty with what it paid for advertising and parts suppliers. Schwinn used "Schwinn Approved" Steyr copies of AWs for part of the later 1950s, especially in 1958-59. This was certainly cheaper, but the Austrian-made copies were not as good as the British originals. Schwinn did the same thing with Phillips-made brakes in the mid-1950s. There was a brief period of a couple years where Schwinn used English-made Phillips brake levers and calipers. They were subsequently able to get alloy Weinmann 810s at a better price, and so went with those. The Weinmanns were also lighter and somewhat better functioning than the Phillips.

tcs

Here's my undated "Patent" AW with 36 holes.




S-A mythology relates the undated Patent AW hubs were either made early, before the K hub production was ended, or assembled during the war when bomb fuse manufacture ran light.

I wish this hub could talk and tell me its history!

tcs

Schwinn (late 1957): We want some AWs.
Sturmey: How about some of our spiffy SWs?
Schwinn telegrams Steyr.

Ged117 

This is timely. I have a lampset off a '49 Clubman that I'm going to run on my 1959 Raleigh Canadian, and I'd like to put together a little circuit and run an LED with a capacitor to avoid the flashing, along with an LED in the rear lamp.

In other news, I managed to score this 32h stainless Raleigh rim, and I see on SirMike1983 's most excellent blog The Bike Shed that for a “standard” low flange front hub with that rim, spoke length listed is 11 7/32”. For 3-cross technique, I've seen elsewhere that this measures using the calculators to 271mm length, 14 or 15 gauge. Does that jive with the experience here? I'd like to source stainless spokes, and I think the recommendation is to use brass spoke washers at the flange and a flat washer at the rim.

SirMike1983 

I think the second explanation is closer to the truth. The bikes I've found the undated hubs on, and the innards of those hubs, all looked to date to the early WWII era through just after the war (1940-48 based on the bikes I've worked on). There are a couple variations of undated hub imprints, one saying "Patent" and the other saying "Patent Pending". The "pending" one logically would be a touch older. In fact, I'm currently rebuilding a 1947 Schwinn Continental 3 speed with an undated "Patent" AW hub.

Salubrious

My understanding was the 'patent' hubs are 1938 or 1939. At that point the type K discontinued. They had the first trigger shifters to go with, which are extremely rare- the quadrant shifter was still available. IIRC this was documented in 'The Hub of the Universe' which is an interesting read on SA history.

I have a 1940 AW hub that is in black and marked '40'; also a 'patent' AW hub on a Royal Enfield, which was equipped with all-black SA hardware, typical of what you see with a pre-war machine (with a quadrant shifter), which seems to support Hadland's story in his book.