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From the Sheldon Brown archives comes this crazy hack. Just looking at it blows my mind.
Bruce Ingle is the brains behind the operation and states:
I got the idea for a bichain drive from “The Dancing Chain ” a while ago, finally had some time to get it working on Friday and took it out for an 80-mile ride Sunday…so now I have a working bike with 37″ freewheel, 70″ fixed and 94″ fixed gears, all selectable with a single lever. It’s quite fun to ride.
I’m not sure dude is speaking English on the site with descriptions such as this:
The hub is a steel shell, splined left ball cup Sturmey-Archer AW modified to 2-speed fixed by brazing the planet cage to the left ball cup with a MAPP torch and removing the low-gear pawls.
Don’t know about the rest of you, but as I read that all I heard in my brain was, “Wah wha wah. Wah, wah wah. Whaaaaa, wha, wah wha.”
For all the gory details, visit Sheldon’s site.
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Filed Under: modification
1 comment for this entry ↓
1 Val // Apr 18, 2008 at 9:26 am
The Sturmey AW to 2 speed fixed hack has been around for a while; mechanics at the (now defunct) Bikesmith in Seattle arrived at the same basic method independently, only to discover that it had been done various ways before. The really sketchy part of this particular version is the use of a one speed freewheel to create a facsimilie of freewheel threads by simply screwing it onto the left side of the hub. Self tapping freewheel, sort of. The good part is that if it fails, the other drive train still works. The bad part is that the fixed side has a large amount of free play, or “backlash”, due to the internal construction of the Sturmey hub. This is why we switched to Bendix 2 speed hubs for our fixed gear conversoins at the Bikesmith. Foreign enough for you?
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