il padrone wrote:ironhanglider wrote:Skills maybe, a sense of history no. You've been looking at bikes from the 80's. These will almost all have screw on clusters. Spacers would be required for a cassette style freehub which didn't become available until the 90's.
Hmmm, sense of history ?? Yes.
The first cassette freehubs were available from ~1979. I have a bike that I had built in 1981 and it has a 5-speed freehub, and at first it had a cassette that was seperate sprockets with spacers. One-piece cassettes came later.
By the late 80s cassettes and freehubs were pretty much the norm for most new bikes. I'd say bikes from the 80s about today would be at least 50/50 cassettes and screw-on.
Oooh a debate!
I wasn't disputing the existence of free hubs, merely the proportion. Cassettes & freehubs were certainly becoming the norm for 'good' bikes but certainly wasn't universal. There were also still a lot of low end road bikes that used screw-ons exclusively, and the low end bikes outsold the good ones by quite a margin, until the very late 80's when the low end bikes were almost all MTB's.
I'll even cite Sheldon
Freewheels for Threaded Hubs:
Traditional rear hubs came with a standardized set of threads to which a standard freewheel/sprocket cluster could be screwed on. This allowed any brand of freewheel to be mounted on any brand of hub. If you wore out your sprockets, or wanted different gear ratios, you could unscrew the cluster and install a new one.
Almost all bikes made through the late 1980s used this system.
Cassette Freehubs
...
Most decent-quality bikes made since the late 1980s have used this greatly improved design.
Cassettes and freehubs were almost exclusively made by Shimano at this time. There was also some resistance at the top end of the market from the older riders who still distrusted anything Shimano (They were the ones who brought out strange looking angled teeth, Positron shifting, 10mm pitch chains, and Biopace afterall). Screw-ons were still sufficiently common for Sachs to bring out an 8speed version in the 90s which could be used with Campag systems but the product line didn't last long since all but the lightest riders would break axles due to the long distance between the bearings and the dropout.
I still say that a much higher proportion of 80's rear wheels still in existence will have a screw-on.
I still enjoy discussing antique equipment. I recently won a crit in the old fat blokes grade using friction shifters and non aero brake levers.
Regards,
Cameron
