Pre 1950s rides of LFGSS: old bikes, vintage rats, classic lightweights

I have two sets, one is the older style with the chamfered edge and the other is a mixed box unfortunately.
The pedal axles are still attached because I can't get them out.!

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Oh man, bummer.

Made me sit and ponder whether I could handle differently chamfered cranks of the same model. I concluded you probably were and would live a richer and fuller life :D

And I’d already been knobbing on about dome headed nuts in the dms. Lols

What have you tried to get them out? I cracked a rib trying to get the fixed cup out of that Gillott and gave up and took it to Argos.

Installing cotters:

Doesn’t matter which way the cotter goes in. Crank forwards / cotter down or crank backwards / cotter down. One is the English way, the other is the Continental way. One way your flares will get tangled up on the nut, the other way they won’t. I can’t remember which is which.

Support the underside of the crank as Clubman did or with a stout piece of pipe between the crank and ground. Cotter goes in with the flat against the axle flat. Wriggle it down until it seats. Give it a couple of sharp blows with a hammer and tighten the nut. DO NOT use the nut to tighten the cotter in because it will shear. Do a short test ride and check it, repeat the above if necessary.

New cotters aren’t as good as old ones. If you get your old ones out in good condition I recommend re-using them. Next best is NOS old ones. For new ones, you’ll see that some of them look machined and some of them have a smooth rolled finish. Choose the latter, as the former are just machined low grade steel and are too soft and weak. Definitely get 3/8” cotters if you can, if they’re Imperial, for the reasons Clubman made.

The odd set set were spare, I've only taken them out as I couldn't get the pedals axles off the good pair.
I have tried various tricks but to know avail, my next step was to apply more heat now that I have dismantled the pedals. I was hoping the alloy cranks would expand more than the chromoly axle's.
Any other suggestions?

Soak them in Plus Gas or similar for as long as you can.
Weeks.
Forget them.
Soak for longer.
Then try heating the crank arms, aluminium expands faster than steel, but this might not help in the short term, as the cranks will in theory tighten onto the threads, not sure. A few cycles of heating then cooling may help to break the bond that’s formed between the steel and aluminium (this is an electrochemical bond I think I remember).
You might repeat step one if you’re not in a hurry.
If you’re not worried about keeping the pedal spindles clamp them firmly in a vice and turn the crank to get more leverage and unscrew the thread.
Check you’re turning the right way (left = left hand thread 🤪)

Not quite the same thing but I had a Harden alloy nut stuck on a steel hub axle recently (in the shell and needing to come out). After brute force I tried wd40, cooling it in the freezer and popping it in a hot oven - hoping that the steel and aluminium would expand and contract at different speeds. I bought some soft vice grip jaws to try and hold the axle but they just got chewed up. In the end I tightened two steel nuts together at the same end of the axle and used brute force again, maybe all the cocking about loosened it. I did pinch the threads slightly doing that sob

I have recently seen a post where somebody removed a stuck stem by tipping the frame upside down and pouring evaporust down the headtube and letting it soak overnight.

Looks like there are flats on your pedal axle though. Can you get those in a big bench vice? [I know easier said than done sometimes - I have to go to my dad's. Good old dads and their fuck-off big bench vices. He inherited it from his dad so maybe one day it will be mine :)] Then make a bigger lever of your crank with a pipe or something and apply brute force?

Speak for yourself, neither of my dads were ever much good at anything practical, certainly never had many tools to speak of (I always remembered my dad’s electric drill was 60s, it belonged to a former neighbour in Cwmbran, and he never returned it the sod). I certainly don’t remember either of them fixing a puncture let alone separating a stuck beautiful old bike bit.

I grew up taking my bike to this really old fella in New Bradwell, was about three mile from me in Stony Stratford. Rode there on me own from about age nine, he used to sort out stuff I couldn’t figure out. He was a total gent, I wish he’d been my grampa I coulda got some proper workshop stuff left to me.

I didn't say he helped, just he's got a fuck-off big bench vice :) That's the one I used to bang out cotters on. He was into motorbikes before having kids ruined it all and one of his favourite quips is telling my grandpa (mum's dad) that "if he had enough time to polish his spokes he wouldn't spend it polishing spokes" :D

Funny having kids now I realise jut how annoying it was for me to play around with his tools all the time.

I traded my beautiful massive Victorian Record engineers’ vice with a mate in London before I moved to the States, he then married a lunatic and dropped all his old mates so there’s no chance of getting that back . 😭

Wow thanks everyone for the advise.
I have been attempting to undo these since before Christmas, so they have been soaking in everything from vinegar to Gt40 since then. I had tried loads of leverage and heat and all i managed to do was break my vice.
What's annoying is that the pedals were my best, favourite and most expensive set of pedals I own and the most contemporary. "Shimano Dura Ace 9100"
Not any more.!
Anyway I had another go just now and armed with a new vice, a pitch fork for leverage and a roofing blow torch, I've done it brute force and a load of heat.

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Good job.
Hardcore

For future reference not all oils are equal.
Penetrating oil is different from water displacing oils like GT85 and WD40

Plus Gas has always worked for me freeing stuck posts etc
The longer you soak the better.

^ Lol, is that a shovel handle?

Love that pic!

@absurdbird thanks for the tip, I had assumed wd40 was what people meant by penetrating oil, never checked it.

Pitch fork handle.
@absurdbird. Noted about the oil, but what do you mean about the Gas?

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Plus Gas is a brand of penetrating oil

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Also, grease them threads!

Well done. I feel your pain re breaking the vice and also your DA pedals. My own vice is a piece of crap and I have also broken that. I also damaged my Shimano Ultegra pedals idiotically trying to service them. You can get new spindles https://www.sjscycles.co.uk/pedals-cleats/shimano-duraace-spdsl-pdr9100-pedal-axle-assembly-left-yl8898030/ However I don't think I bought new spindles, can't quite remember what I damaged but think it was cosmetic and I learnt to live with it when I saw the price of spindles :D

Roger that.!

Cotter Pins

Dear Jonny,

You've pre-empted my post!

It's my own fault for being slow, but the fact is I've found it more difficult than I expected to put the process into words - it's the sort of thing that's best learnt from a demonstration in the flesh. However now that Jonny has broken the back of the problem I'll try to add a few helpful hints.

Filing

I guess this is the tricky bit - it's a low tech skill and something we're not very used to doing nowadays.

You will need a good file (sharp, but not too coarse) and a vice, preferably firmly bolted onto a bench. In an emergency you might hold the cotter in a Mole wrench, but this is not recommended.

It's possible to be lucky and have cotters that just go straight in without filing, but this is unusual and normally you will find the cotters need to have some material removed so that they go far enough into the crank to allow sufficient thread projecting to take the securing nut. Unless you're careful you will alter the slope of the pin's flat (or you may well have started with a pair of cotters that weren't the same to start with) and this will cause the cranks to go out of line. Now it will be necessary to adjust the angle of at least one of your cotters, and this is not so easy to describe - I suggest you look down on the non straight cranks and picture in your mind's eye whether the slope on the offending pin is too shallow or too steep, then put that cotter back in the vice and file it to achieve the desired alteration in the slope of the flat.
The 'offending' cotter is the one with most 'meat' on it - the thicker one, because it's possible to file away so much metal that there's no thread left projecting beyond the crank.

An elementary mistake is to put both cotters in the same way round, which will certainly put the cranks out of line. I'm sure no one on this forum would do this, but I have seen bikes being ridden with this fault.

As Jonny says, the continental practice is the opposite from the British method, which is: crank forward, nut upwards. I've seen a lot of discussion about why one way is better than the other, but I note there a lot of very well used bikes around which have both methods, and I conclude that it really doesn't matter.

When reusing old cotters, there is often a burr (or witness mark) where the pin has been in contact with the spindle - remove this with your file so that the flat is flat, but don't take off more material than is necessary.

When fitting the filed cotter pin, again as Jonny says, supporting the crank is very important. I like to put some thin oil on the mating surfaces because I believe this helps the pin to 'settle'. There does usually seem to be some settling in, and that's why it is essential to check for tightness after a couple of miles and then again after a longer ride. Once it's firmly settled your cotter pin should stay in place for decades of use, and still be removable and reusable by future generations of old bike users.

I had hoped to pass my knowledge on to a future generation, but out of three children and the first two grandchildren I have been quite unable to stir up any interest in the subject. However the third grandchild is at least beginning to show some promise. I have a photo of her aged about two apparently about to attack a very small child's trike with quite a large spanner - I would have posted it here, but pictures of small children have a bad reputation on the internet. I will post a tamer pic in a few minutes when I've found it.

Always crank forward and threads down - learned the hard way by shredding my T-Rex style "loon pants" back in the 70's.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-1940s-Hobbs-Of-Barbican-Lytaloy-Mudguards-/265027602145?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49292
During the first lockdown a set of these sold for a staggering 900 pound on Ebay in worse condition than this.!

I didn’t mention filing. I think I’ve been lucky the last couple of times that I haven’t had to do it. Like you say, it’s a very easy thing to get wrong. Another thing that came to mind when I was reading your post is before filing the flats it’s worth checking where the cotter is actually catching. Sometimes you just need to file the edges of the flats so it clears the slot in the axle and then it drops correctly into place. Again, you want to take the absolute minimum of material off so that you don’t affect the crank location.

I’ve also been told that using engineers’ Marking Blue is good to ensure an even mating surface between cotter pin and spindle.
I’ve basically done what’s described above in the past, which I would have probably read in Richard’s Bicycle Book - a pre internet English Sheldon Brown.
I learned a lot from that book.
I haven’t regularly ridden a bike with a cottered chainset for a looong time, but I used to ride for years all over London on a 1920s Humber with rod brakes and steel rims.
Deadly.

That Simplex bottle cage will go for crazy money too.
Seller has some interesting stuff, that early cable operated Benelux mech is rare af.

Yes Im watching that, I'm after a suitable vintage down tube bottle cage holder, on a budget of course.