Powerplus or Bust, Eh?

[Shaky Jake]

Front Wheel Disassembly

I want to get two wheels put together so I can roll the bike into my trailer to take it to Davenport with me for Labor Day weekend. The first step is to get the old wheels off, take them apart, and see what parts I'm going to need. The tires were so fossilized that I couldn't even get the front wheel off because the tire wouldn't clear the forks. Out came the tin snips. It's funny, I felt a little sad and queasy taking the snips to those tires that are probably older than me (and I'm pretty old). It had to be done though.









The spokes on the front wheel are actually pretty good, other than some surface rust, and there's only one spoke missing:






The bearing cups in the hub have some pits. They would work for a while, but not from coast to coast:






The hollow axle is in good shape. It has caged bearings, which look to be in pretty good shape. One of the bearing cones is in really good shape, the other one has some pitting:






Here's the good cone after cleaning:






And here's the pitted one. It looks worse in the picture than in real life:






The center axle is fubar. Someone has re-tapped the threads, which I believe should be 3/8 - 24, with coarse threads:







The rim itself looks pretty rusty, but the wastage isn't that bad and I think it can be saved:






So I've contacted a couple of vendors about front wheel hub bearing cups, bearing cones, and a center axle, and I'm waiting to hear back from them. I know that I can get new ball bearings. I've also ordered material to make a center axle if I need to.

These are my thoughts on the original front wheel; If I can't get new cups and cones, I'll probably clean the old ones up, grease them up good, and assemble them. I'll de-rust the rim, replace the missing spoke, adjust the spokes, put a tire on it, and call it good. It will be the spare wheel for the Cannonball, and it will be my normal original wheel after the Cannonball. The thing is, the Cannonball goes through some high traffic areas, which is a condition that bikes were not designed for in 1916. So you need a wheel with front brake, and one can be installed without modifying the fork or the rest of the bike in any way. Here is a link: http://occhiolungo.wordpress.com/201...an-early-bike/

If anyone has any Indian front wheel cups or cones, I would be interested. I'm also looking for a drum brake wheel from a ~1970's dirt bike, with a 21 inch aluminum rim. It has to be less than 3 inches wide at the axle, anything narrower than that would work, I can make spacers. I also discovered that I don't have the rear engine mount plates, so if anyone has a line on a set of those, let me know. I don't know how I didn't notice that before.


Kevin

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[frichie68]

A little Armorall would've saved those tires...

[Shaky Jake]

Old Wheel Terminology

Quick update on the front wheel - Walker Machine says they have the front wheel hub ball cups in stock, so I ordered a set. They said they can make me a set of cones too, but it will take a couple of months or so. So, when the new cups come in I'll put the front wheel together with them, new balls, and the old cones. I'll have to make a new center axle myself. It will be easy to change out the cones after the AMCA Davenport meet. Also, I was able to salvage two original Indian spokes from one of the rear wheels, and they are an identical match for the spokes on the front wheel, so I will be able to replace the missing spoke on my front wheel with one of them. When it's all done the front wheel will have new guts, but still be crusty on the outside.




I've learned that the wheels on these old motorcycles are built more like a modern bicycle wheel than like a modern motorcycle wheel. If you're not familiar with bicycle wheels, the names of the parts might seem strange. For example, the bearing races that are pressed into the hub are called cups:






And the other bearing races are called the cones, and they have a dust shield around them:






The wheels have two axles, a hollow axle and a center axle. This is the hollow axle:






The hollow axle is threaded on both ends. Note that the threads are shorter on one end than the other. The short threads are the stationary end, because the cone on that end threads tight against the shoulder. The long threads are the adjustable end, because the cone on that end is used to adjust the bearing clearances:








This is the center axle:






The balls can either be caged or loose. Here are some examples of both:






The hollow axle goes through the hub:






Then the balls go in:






Then the cones go on:






Then the center axle goes in, to hold the wheel to the forks:





The front wheels don't have a bushing between the center axle and the hollow axle (none is listed in the parts list) so it appears that it's just the O.D. of the center axle that centers it in the I.D. of the hollow axle. On the rear wheel, which I will post shortly, there is a bushing to center the center axle in the hollow axle.



Kevin

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[Shaky Jake]

Rear Wheel (1)

The rear wheel came off without cutting the tire - until after. It had an oversized inner tube folded up inside of it, visible before the tire was even removed from the rim:






Some of the lettering was still visible on the rear tire, it was a Goodyear, size 28 x 3:






In this next picture you can see the skip-tooth bicycle sprocket that someone had fitted to it. The little part with the red paint on it is the bushing I mentioned earlier, that centers the center axle in the hollow axle. It also acts as a spacer between the ends of the wheel assembly and the swingarm. The little fishtail piece is the axle adjuster, you can see the one original rear axle nut that I have, the 7/16" balls, and the end of the stationary cone:






Next is a picture of the brake side (right hand side) of the wheel. You can see the adjusting cone. On the rear wheel the adjusting cone is different than the stationary cone, the adjusting cone has a hex on it and the stationary cone does not. After looking things over I think the wheel was assembled wrong. It looks to me like the stationary cone should be on the right side, shouldered against the brake hub, and the adjusting cone should be on the left side where it is accessible without removing the brake hub. If anyone knows, please comment. Here's the picture:






This is the reproduction brake hub that I got from Ziggy Kapuscinski:






As you can see in this picture, the hollow axle was broken in two pieces:






Probably because of the broken hollow axle, one of the bushings is severely worn where it inserts into the hollow axle:






The bearing cups look a bit rough, but we'll see what they look like after I clean them up:







Stay tuned - more to come.

Kevin

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[Shaky Jake]

Rear Wheel (2)

Once the rear wheel hub cups were cleaned up, you could see some pits, as I expected.








After I soaked it in Evaporust, and preserved it with Strongarm, the adjusting cone looked pretty good:






The stationary cone was pitted, and it was frozen to the broken hollow axle:






The bushings cleaned up pretty well in the Evaporust:






I was able to get the sprocket nut off. It's a little beat up, but useable:






Some of the spokes had been replaced with bailing wire secured with a little square of tin on the inside of the rim. Notice the fossilized bugs in the second picture. I wonder if they could extract some DNA and start a Jurassic Park:








And some of the spokes had been replaced with #9 wire twisted together:






The rim itself looks like it can be saved:






Next, I'll post some pictures of the spare wheel.

Kevin

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[rwm]

do you really plan on ridding clinchers in the cannonball ?

[Shaky Jake]

do you really plan on ridding clinchers in the cannonball ?

I'm still up in the air about that Rob. I have heard that Coker has had some quality issues with their clincher tires. Other than that, I really don't know much about them. If you or anyone has any knowledge or experience to share, I would be very interested in hearing about it. Since I'm planning to build a drum brake front wheel, as I mentioned, it would be most easy to keep a drop center rim on it. I have a spare rear hub so I could build a drop center wheel with that. Then I could use modern tires, which are probably better. But this isn't about being better, it's about being old. So, I'm up in the air. Input is desired.

Kevin

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[Shaky Jake]

The Spare Rear Wheel (1)

As I mentioned earlier, I have a spare rear wheel. It was presumed to be the wheel to the sidecar, but it's actually a rear wheel. The good news is, it has a good hollow axle:






The pits in the cones are pretty bad though:






Somebody had bolted a solid piece of a tire to the rim, with no pneumatics:










I wonder how that worked out for them. Obviously, that had to come off:






There was a rim strip on it, I'm not sure why. And there was a lot of rust. And what appeared to be a piece of an old belt. Who knows what they were thinking:









Kevin

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[Shaky Jake]

The Spare Rear Wheel (2)

It had been fitted with a grease cup in the place of the normal grease fitting. And, similar to the front wheel, there was some fancy spoke work:








The rim was rusted beyond repair. You could actually see light through it in some places:








Since the rim was shot, I went ahead and de-spoked it. It took all afternoon, but I was able to remove 26 of the 36 spokes with out cutting or breaking them. The two spokes on the left match the spokes in the front wheel, and most of the spokes in the other rear wheel, so I think there is a good chance that they are original Indian spokes. I will use one of them to replace the one spoke missing from the front wheel:






After soaking in the Evaporust for a bit, the hub looked really good. The threads are good on both ends. One of the bearing cups is cracked but replacements are available. After a little hand work to clean it up, I'll see about getting this one re-plated:














That's it for today. Next I need to take stock of what rear wheel parts I have that are good (between the two wheels), what parts I can buy, and formulate a plan to build a Cannonball worthy rear wheel.


Kevin

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[rwm]

keep the clinchers for ridding around the fairgrounds and swap meets. the best way to look at it is you would not run the Boston marathon in flip flops. i'm not sure if you can even get a good tube for them.
this part probably wont gain me any friends " lonnie should not let anybody run them in his event"

[exeric]

Also, I would convert your hubs to run Timken tapered roller bearings, or quality sealed ball bearings if you want to run at sustained speeds. You should have no trouble finding modern bearings that can be adapted to your hubs, and some creative machine work will make them invisible, and undetectable. Years ago, my '17 Hen spit out the balls in the rear hub while moving. What a mess.

[Shaky Jake]

Thread Standard Ramble

I woke up this morning thinking about the history of thread standards. In High School, I used to hate history, now I find it fascinating. The early 1900's must have been an exciting time in industry. You had guys like Edison, Glenn Curtis, the Wrights, Hedstrom, Harley & Davidson, Henry Ford, and on and on, all working out the basic standards and techniques that we still use and refine today. They took design and manufacturing from not much more than 'arts and crafts,' all the way to mass production of complicated machines. If you think about it, before the late 1800's, we were still at the tail end of the iron age. People were still shoving hunks of iron into fires and beating on them with a big hammer, while some kid pumped on a bellows to keep the fire hot. A few years later, in the early 1900's, the civilized world was fully industrialized.

What got me thinking about all this? The fact that I can't go down to the hardware store and buy a 1/4" - 24 TPI bolt to hold the fender on my Indian. 1/4 - 24 doesn't match any modern standard. On the Indian almost every fastener has 24 threads per inch. So far, I've seen 24 TPI on everything from 1/4 inch bolts to 7/8 inch hollow axles. Most of the people on this forum have spun a wrench at some time or another and know that, in the modern world, thread pitch usually changes with bolt size to some extent. Indian's engineers, for whatever reason, stuck with 24 TPI on everything. I wish I could talk to them about it, just to understand their thinking. As an Engineer myself, I envy their freedom to create their designs without having to mold their thoughts to fit preconceived standards.

Looking at the history of the Society of Automotive Engineers on Wikipedia this morning, I know that they started in 1902. But it sounds like they didn't really get going until 1916 (same year my bike was built) when they joined forces with folks from the American Society of Aeronautical Engineers, the Society of Tractor Engineers, National Association of Engine and Boat Manufacturers, the National Gas Engine Association, the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, the National Gas Engine Association and the National Association of Engine and Boat Manufacturers. I suspect that the railroad guys had a hand in things too, but I didn't see anything about that. I'm pretty sure the gun industry had a lot to do with thread standardization as well. Having been an Engineer for the last 32 years, I know it makes sense to have standards. There's no reason to design every fastener, alloy, chain, key way, etc. from scratch. With standards, you can pick these things from a catalog and design your machine around them.

I know from past reading that, prior to the early 1900's, most bolt threads were fairly coarse, because the metals weren't that good. As industry advanced, better alloys were developed that made finer threads possible. Early American (SAE) thread standards are now called UNC (Unified National Coarse). Early British thread standards were also coarse, and they're called Whitworth. UNC and Whitworth fasteners are both in inches, and if it wasn't for the fact that early Whitworth used 55 degree rounded threads, and SAE used 60 degree threads with a squared off tip, they otherwise match pretty close. If you use my example of a 1/4 inch bolt, Whitworth and UNC are both 20 TPI. 3/8 Whitworth and UNC are both 16 TPI. A 1/2 inch Whitworth, however, is 12 TPI while a 1/2 inch UNC is 13. Anyway, as better alloys were developed (being driven by world wide industrialization and world wide wars) they were able to cut finer threads so we Americans developed Unified National Fine (UNF) threads and the British developed CEI and BSC (Cycle Engineers Institute and British Standard Cycle) threads. The other big difference between British and American bolt standards the way the wrenches are labeled. The Brits decided that every 1/4 inch Whitworth bolt must have the same size head, and the wrench you use to turn it will be called a 1/4 Whitworth wrench. We Americans decided that a 1/4 inch bolt can have any size head you want, and you just use a wrench that fits the distance across the flats (AF) of the head to turn it. So a 1/4 inch UNC bolt might use a 3/8 inch wrench, or it might use a 7/16 inch wrench. Either way works, I guess we were still just a little more focused on freedom than the Brits at the time.

If you read through the old Indian advertisements from the teens, they were very proud of their advanced metallurgy. The ads say that their motorcycles are made from vanadium steel. I'm not a metallurgist, but it must have been good stuff for the time. Henry Ford made also made his chassis' out of vanadium steel during that period. Anyway, it's safe to assume that the materials that Indian was using were capable of supporting fine threads because most of the threads on my motorcycle have held up for almost 100 years. Fine threads were pretty high tech at the time, I think.

So, in the end, what will I do about my fender bolts? I'll go to a hardware store (which are getting harder to find) and buy a 1/4 - 28 bolt with a long shank, cut the threaded part off, and thread the shank with a 1/4 - 24 threading die. I'm not sure why they still sell 1/4 - 24 threading dies, but I'm thankful that they do.

Enjoy your weekend.


Kevin

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[exeric]

Very interesting post Kevin, and I often have the same thoughts when I come across some remarkable piece of ancient engineering. I just bought a AMMECUP/Weston ammeter for my '19 Henderson. In taking it apart to replace the lens, I have seen craftsmanship, engineering, and tool and die work that has no equal today. Our love of early motorcycles is just a testament to our mental illness of anachronism. . . And I have no interest in a cure

[Shaky Jake]

Wheels - What to Do

I really appreciate the input on tires and bearings. I'm conflicted over this. I am going to build a set of original wheels, with clincher tires and ball bearings, but I am still considering whether to use them for the Cannonball. I have a spare rear hub, and I have a lathe, so I could make some adapters to replace the ball cups, that would hold tapered bearings. Then I could lace on a 36 hole drop center rim. The little white guy on my right shoulder says that would be easy enough. The little red guy on my left shoulder says "but Cannonball Baker had clincher tires. And balls ." The white guy says "but Baker wasn't riding sustained speeds on Interstate highways in heavy traffic" the red guy says "but he was riding in harsh conditions across mountains and deserts, and he made it." The white guy says "Oh, everything has to be perfect with you." The red guy says "Pussy." And it escalates from there. You get the idea.

One guy on another forum suggested using a modern dynamo front hub, with drum brake, from http://www.sturmey-archer.com/produc...48/tech/1.html . My Indian doesn't have an electrical system. I was planning on using a rechargeable battery pack to run the lights, if needed. I would recharge it every night. But with the Sturmey Archer dynamo hub, I could charge the battery going down the road.

So, two of my options might be:

A - Build my original wheels and use them as back-ups for the Cannonball. Build a Cannonball rear wheel with tapered bearings, drop center wheel, and a modern tire. Build a new front wheel with drum brake and dynamo, drop center wheel, and modern tire. Then, in the evenings, I can spend my time drinking and carousing with the other Cannonballers, rather than adjusting wheels bearings, charging batteries, and changing tires.

Or:

#2 - Another option would be to build two sets of original style wheels, so I have a spare set. Take the chance of crashing into someone in traffic due to no front brake, or falling off when one of my hubs spits it's balls out. Spend my evenings servicing wheels instead of drinking, carousing, and sleeping, but feel like a hero when (if) I finish.


It sounds like I have two votes for option A. Any advocates of option #2?


Thanks for your input - seriously.



Kevin

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[exeric]

I'm glad you brought Mr. Baker into the discussion because he did use "original" equipment, and he made his rides alone, and without support vehicles. He also did his record runs under much worse conditions, with extreme time pressure, and virtually no support along the way.

My personal opinion is; the most noble accomplishment would be on clinchers, no front brake, and cone-ball-and cup wheel bearings.

But, safety has to be considered, and so does fun.