23 Jul 2020

Disassembling the Raleigh Sports

Upon taking the Raleigh Sports into the shop for disassembly, I got a better sense of what I was getting into.

I think I should be seeing a spoke here. Amazingly, the Raleigh steel rim was still surprisingly true.

The original Raleigh pedals should clean up well. They were really built to last.

All the smart parts are put in bins and tagged as needed to keep track of them. Yes, there are a lot of loose bearings in a Raleigh headset.

Two days with a heavy-duty clamp and penetrating oil, and still, one of the cotter pins would not budge.

Eventually I had to resort to drilling it out. Which was as terrible as you might imagine.

When I finally got the bottom bracket apart, I found the remains of a whole colony of approximately ball-bearing-sized insects in there.

In the process, I got to experience a few quirks of old Raleighs for myself:

They're ridiculously overbuilt. Even though the '70s versions (like this one) cut a lot more corners than the legendarily well-made '50s versions, it was still clearly a bicycle that was built to last. Which means even parts that seem way too far gone to save tend to clean up well, most times.
None of your wrenches will fit. Raleigh used their own standards and if either a metric or standard wrench fits, it's down to luck and coincidence, so you best have a collection of good adjustable wrenches. I like this Channel-Lock, which doubles as a cone nut wrench.
There are a ridiculous number of ball bearings in old Raleighs, and they're all loose. Be sure you're ready to catch them all when you open up the headset, bottom bracket, or basically anything else.

Coming up next, we dive into the mysteries (and gunk) of a long-neglected Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub.

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See all the Raleigh Sports posts.

Tags: raleigh

Next on Re-Cycled: Sturmey-Archer three-speed rebuild
Previously on Re-Cycled: The bedraggled Raleigh