If you’re shopping for a second hand bike, swerve any featuring these troublesome relics from the past... cycling
Browse bike ads on eBay and Facebook Marketplace and you’ll see a lot of ‘vintage’ bikes and half-finished ‘projects’ featuring archaic bike parts that have all but vanished from mainstream cycling use — for good reasons. Here are eight dubious and archaic features that you should swerve if you’re shopping for a second hand bike...A cottered crank is held on to the axle by a shaped bolt called a cotter pin. The axle is mostly round with a section at the end where the crank sits.
The worst was that a threaded hub had a significant length of unsupported axle between the bearings and the frame, which often led to bent or even broken axles. That became more and more of a problem as gearing grew to six and seven sprockets. By moving the drive-side bearing much closer to the dropout, Shimano’s freehub design solved the problem and eventually led to the 11, 12 and even 13-sprocket hubs we have now.
One answer was to put shift levers up on the handlebar stem, where they lurked ready to stab you in the vitals if you crashed. That’s a bad idea that still hasn’t been completely hounded out of existence. The Gran Sport might not have been first, but it was tough, mechanically simple and worked well compared to other derailleurs of the era. It was a roaring success.
Straight parallelogram derailleurs like the Eco don’t generally shift very well because they end up with a big length of laterally flexible chain between the top jockey wheel and smaller sprockets. Even the cheapest modern derailleurs, like the Shimano Tourney, shift better thanks to subtle tweaks in their geometry.
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