Freewheels 1 (2017)

(Original post 24.6.2017)

I’ll never get started with this blog if I don’t just post the things that are happening. History of myself and the bike will have to wait. This is what happened this week. I took the bike outside and took off the chain & the freewheel.

The chain is ****ed. Well, that’s ok. I don’t expect a chain to come out of the winter smiling. It had been running in a paste of dirt and salt and oil for long enough. But the freewheel. Ugh.

This was a new part last September. Now, I don’t want to knock it. I needed that 34-tooth sprocket to get me riding up hills again. But the state of it. Just one winter of not all that much riding. But Shimano seem to have decided that threaded freewheels no longer need to be made out of the most rust-resistant steel.
I might not have been looking at it quite so critically if I hadn’t decided, last time I did my hilly route over the Trötsch, that on the last climb I really wanted a gear between bottom, 30:34, and second, 30:24. So far, my legs have always been a bit tired by the time I get over there. It’s slightly over a kilometre of really unbroken climbing and the second half is steeper than the first. So the state of this ‘MegaRange’ freewheel and my wish for a gear ratio between 0.88 and 1.25 motivated me to dig out my old freewheel for a closer look.

I hadn’t actually inspected it closely for wear last year, just swapped chain, (a) chainring and freewheel in one go, by default. Turned out though, once it was clean, the old freewheel looked just fine. No real wear on the teeth at all.

But the big sprocket is a 28. So to get the gears I want I’m going to try out a 24T chainwheel. Now 52-40-24 on the front:

The problems with such a tiny chainwheel are two. One: is the bottom of the derailleur cage low enough that the chain won’t drag on it? The derailleur is a Shimano 105 (mountain version) I bought in around 1997. It is certainly not officially rated to cope with the 52-24 range. But it looks like it’ll be ok with the chain on the biggest two or three sprockets, and that’s all I need.

Problem 2 will be the shifting. The derailleur can knock the chain off the middle ring but won’t be able to control where it lands. Enough instances of chain suck have demonstrated, alas, that I lack the telepathic powers of a pinball wizard with the gear lever. I think a chain catcher such as the n-gear Jump Stop may be needed, & I’ll try to get one asap.

That chainset, by the way, is a Specialized ST as described here by the Retrogrouch – made by Sugino, with easily recognizable descendants in the Alpina 2 and the XD2.
Why am I faffing around with freewheels at all? Well, meet my hubs.