Saturday, October 19, 2013

Bottom Bracket, Crankset, Rear Hub, & Cassette

New parts came in last night, and I spent some time today mocking the bike up. I'm not going to torque things down just yet, I'm just test fitting at the moment.

So, New Toys!
Shimano BB-UN55 - These are available in various sizes and I think they are way better than rebuilding the original bottom bracket, just from a dependability standpoint. I went with 107 x 68 to, hopefully, get the chainline I need with my crankset.

The UN55 is a good replacement for the original Raleigh BB Cups, and is threaded British/ISO @ 24TPI. It comes with an Aluminum off-side cup, unlike the nearly exact UN54 which uses a plastic cup.
I applied a liberal coat of grease to the thread on each cup and installed the drive side first. The BB threads weren't as clean as I thought they were, and I had to stop and completely back things out a couple times, then I went into the BB with a thread chase/gauge and cleaned things up a little bit more.
The drive side will bottom out when fully installed. The non-drive side doesn't have an obvious "stop" on the cup, so it needs to be eyeballed so that it's even with the BB shell.
Crankset installed. Mmmmm, lookin' goooood!

I also installed the new cassette on the rear hub.
Shimano CS-6500

Aaaaannnd, then it got ugly.
The rear derailleur hanger bolt sits about 1mm away from the lock ring on the cassette. It's close enough that if I tighten the hub skewer too tight, it'll touch the lock ring, and cause the rear hub to bind.
I've been able to find very little info on the internet about this, other than the rear dropout is likely bent. I tweaked it about with a crescent wrench and managed to improve things a little bit, but I think it's going to require an expert before I'll feel comfortable riding it.
Sorry, I really, really tried to get a clear photo, but the iPhone camera just can't deal with close up stuff.

That's it for now. I've got a rear derailleur coming on a slow boat from China, literally, and it'll be a couple of weeks before it gets here. Once that comes in, I think I'll get the frame into the shop and see if I can get the dropout fixed up enough to be able to actually ride this thing safely.

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