-
Your Raleigh 20 looks a lot more purposeful than it did when it left the factory.
If you've seen my Sunbeam photos in the old bike thread, I think you can see there's a connection in that we're both trying to make a useable bike from a run of the mill starting point.
I guess your Sturmey hub is an AW (same on the Sunbeam). If so you did well to manage in a group with the 25% down 33% up which it gives. I've found that it's possible to get by reasonably well on my own, but the gaps are far too big to cope with a bunch situation. You would probably find an AM or FM to be superior, but since you're evidently strong enough to cope, using the basic AW makes it more annoying for the owners of the posh bikes!
Do you know how much the Raleigh weighs?
clubman-
Must admit I’ve not been keeping an eye on the pre 50s thread as much as I perhaps should. Have just had a look through it now and your post regarding the continued usage of a giraffe is interesting. I’ve been using mine quite regularly, it’s great fun.
Back to the Twenty, I’m actually using a Brompton BSR (Brompton Standard Range) hub on it, which I believe is a branded up SRF3. I looked at AW hubs and I don’t think there was much reason for choosing the BWR. It has an alloy shell so will be slightly lighter. I think also, I was looking at used hubs and I thought that being more recent, a BSR hub was likely to be in better condition than an AW.
I believe the ratios are the same and I find they work well enough. I did briefly consider swapping the hub out to a BWR (Brompton Wide Range) in order to get a lower bottom gear for climbing. I think they are again made by Sturmey although there doesn’t look to be a Sturmey branded equivalent. The BWR gearing is 64%, 100% and 156% and while that lower gear would be nice on steep climbs, I figured that it wouldn’t be as usable as the gearing I have. On Bromptons the BWR hub is most often fitted with 2 sprockets and a derailleur which adds in-between gears so the jumps aren’t as large.
Never weighed the Twenty, I should…
M_V
It wasn’t ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man on a 10K road bike to have both properly indexed gears and bottle cages that actually hold onto bottles’?