Thanks for bringing up those points, Jan - I'm not specifically against freewheels. My experience was that I regularly bent axles on my old mtb which had a freewheel and never had that problem with any freehubs. My recollection was that the mtb (which was a six speed 1983 drivetrain) had narrower cones than my XT and DuraAce freehubs. But again, no data to back that up.
And I guess the point I was really trying to make stemmed from your comment about the loss of tooling, expertise and the necessary economies of scale involved in making a quality freewheel today. Since most of the bicycle market probably is less likely to support it, it seems freewheel production isn't likely to increase. But since there are plenty of freehubs around, why not continue to let them make the ratchety bits and focus on making something that is not designed to shift in a crosswind. Okay, that's overstating it, but it seems to me that creating a longer-toothed cassette of longer-wearing material might be a simpler option. I just recall walking into the old shops and looking at the cog board in the back. It seems like it should be comparatively easy to come up with a similar solution. Though I'm ignorant of any constraints which are in place for makers having to license the interface spline from Shimano. - Jim / cyclofiend.com On Monday, April 15, 2013 8:43:36 AM UTC-7, Jan Heine wrote: > > The bearings spacing on most cassette hubs is no different from that of a > freewheel hub. With the exception of Shimano and Mavic and a few small > makers, all freehubs have the hub bearings under the flanges, more or less. > As long as the axle is properly designed, that is not a problem. > > The problem with most freewheel hubs were the thin axles. They were > designed for 4-speed and 115 mm spacing. With that short overhang, no > problem. Then they added another 5 mm on the drive-side for 5-speed, and it > was getting marginal. Then they added another 6 mm to use 6-speed, and the > design no longer worked. They now had more than twice the lever as before, > yet kept the diameter of the axle the same. It's surprising that it worked > as well as it did! > > Adding grooves in the axle on both sides made the problem worse. (Who > needs to adjust their hub on both sides? Maxi put the grooves on the > non-drive side only, so you adjusted only that side.) > > There are plenty of freewheel hubs that don't break axles. Don't conclude > from a poor execution that the entire concept is flawed. Cassette hubs have > their own design problems. The biggest one is that the bearings under the > cassette have to be relatively small. > > Jan Heine > Editor > Bicycle Quarterly > http://www.bikequarterly.com > > Follow our blog at http://janheine.wordpress.com/ > > On Sunday, April 14, 2013 11:22:59 PM UTC-7, Cyclofiend Jim wrote: > > >> But, I'm not real keen on going back to the narrow bearing spacing from >> the freewheel days. (Bent waaay too many axles back then.) >> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en-US. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
