Vintage bike help

[uforgot]

Thanks for all the help. I have been trying to find the serial numbers but no luck. Nothing on the bottom bracket. Could be filed off?

As for the cranks, they are Nervar and are cottered. The freewheel goes 16-17-20-24-28. According to the park tool website it needs the suntour 2 prong freewheel tool. Not that I'm going to remove it, I just wanted to identify it. The lever on the hub says A A Atom. Gee, thanks for any help. My motivation is to keep it fairly close to what it was when I clean it up and have it painted.

Thanks again to everyone who replied. It is appreciated!

[DebW]

I've got a 2-prong Suntour freewheel puller if you need it (and the Suntour 4-prong as well, plus 2 styles of Regina). You will need to remove it to repack the hub - which you really should do because old grease turns into hard gunk. That freewheel must have been custom to have a small cog of 16T. I remember Atom hubs and Nervar cranksets. I believe the Raleigh Competition used a cotterless Nervar crankset in around 1974. Does yours really have cotter pins? If cotterless, it is likely that you will need a crank puller specific to Nervar, as there was no standard in such things then. If cottered, you may never get the pins out and would thus be unable to repack the bottom bracket. I'd love to see pics of the crankset, brakes, freewheel, shift levers. For awhile, Suntour made their shift levers work backwards, ie. the spring on the front derailleur moved the chain to the large cog. It didn't really work very well.

[uforgot]

I must have hit the wrong key...the small one IS 14. I also found a website that can identify the year of the derailleur. According to their chart, the rear one was manufactured in October 1975 and the front in July 1976. I already removed the cotter pins. They came out easily and I followed Sheldon Brown's directions. Two whacks and they were clean hits so the nut goes back on. It's all apart except for the hub, and I'll take your advice and remove it and clean it. Didn't think about old gunk there. Thanks for the offer of a freewheel remover, but with postage and all I'll just invest in one. Seems they are only about $6.95. Wait, that's more than I paid for the bike!lol I also have a good relationship with the local lbs. I can always take it to him if I get stuck. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the tires are 27" by 1 1/4. I'll take some pics of the parts. About 6 months ago I also got a Motobecane at the same place for $10. It's the lady's step-through style and I can read all the serial numbers on it. I'm saving it to make it into a single speed someday. I figure this is the best way to learn about bikes, but I will probably learn just enough to be dangerous.

It is really interesting that you worked in a shop in the 70s. In the 70s, I was told that women had no place in high school instrumental music...(I started my working life as a band director). I would imagine that a bike shop would be very weird territory for a woman back then. How did you get involved in that, is that what you are doing now, and how on earth can you remember so much? I looked and looked on the net for that 6360 stamp and couldn't turn up anything, and you just popped it right out! Thanks so much, you have been such a valuable resource!

[DebW]

You were lucky with the cotter pins. Those things can get really stuck. I have an old Raleigh 3-speed I haven't gotten them out of. Our shop used to have a wooden tool with 15 inch lever arms that would pull cotter pins pretty easily. 27 x 1 1/4 tires were the norm. 700c was found only on sewups until maybe the mid 80s.

I got a summer job in a bike shop in 1973, when I was 16, in Florissant, Missouri. The pay was $1.50/hour. I worked there for 4 summers, plus some weekends during the school year. A couple male friends of mine worked there, so I asked for a job. I wasn't interested in any typical female jobs and wanted to learn about bikes. There was a bike boom at the time (1st energy crisis in the US) and help was needed. I think the owner expected that I would mostly do sales and replace his wife who was pregnant and would have to stop working soon, but I said I wanted to learn mechanics, and he started training me. I learned fast and two years later had the best job in the place - assembling, adjusting, and testing all the new bikes we sold. It was often hard to be taken seriously as a mechanic because I was female. Customers who came in the shop were usually convinced pretty quickly (maybe it was the grease on my T-shirt, cutoffs, and hands), but phone customers were always a problem. Several times per day I would answer the phone with "Florissant Cycle" and hear "Can I talk to a mechanic?" Usually I would answer "What do you need?" and satisfy all their questions, but sometimes I couldn't take it any more and would hand the phone to a guy.

I left Missouri to attend MIT in the fall of 1974, though continued my summers in the bike shop until 1976. I graduated from MIT and have been doing atmospheric science ever since, though I still work on my own bikes and those of friends. I'd love to go back to a bike shop someday (I actually got an almost serious offer last year when buying wheel-building parts). The way my science funding is going, I could get my wish in a couple of years. As to how I remember obscure details about bikes from 30 years ago, well, guess that's just how my brain is built, or those are the details that I like to remember.

[uforgot]

I got a summer job in a bike shop in 1973, when I was 16, in Florissant, Missouri.

Ok, this is weird, in 1973 I was 18 and living by Fenton (South County area) and in college (Cape) I dated a guy from Black Jack, right by Florissant. My aunt and uncle owned the Dairy Queen in Village Square shopping center back then. Did you ever go there? I've spent a lot of time in Florissant, but my mall of choice was South County. I even had something stolen out of my car at Northwest Plaza back then, when it was all outside. Remember that?

Atmospheric science? I'm now a physics teacher, although I certainly didn't attend MIT. Wow, that's terrific! Attention to details and remembering them seems reasonable for an MIT grad!

Do you ever make it back to St. Louis? We have a new beautiful stadium now. What a coincidence, both of us growing up in St. Louis!

[DebW]

Ok, this is weird, in 1973 I was 18 and living by Fenton (South County area) and in college (Cape) I dated a guy from Black Jack, right by Florissant. My aunt and uncle owned the Dairy Queen in Village Square shopping center back then. Did you ever go there? I've spent a lot of time in Florissant, but my mall of choice was South County. I even had something stolen out of my car at Northwest Plaza back then, when it was all outside. Remember that?

Do you ever make it back to St. Louis? We have a new beautiful stadium now. What a coincidence, both of us growing up in St. Louis!

I had a friend who lived in Black Jack and spent time there (biking from Florissant). I do know the Village Square shopping center and Northwest Plaza (I didn't know it was an indoor mall now). My parents moved from Florissant to St. Charles about 10 years ago, and I visit them once or twice a year. I'll probably be there in August.

[plantluvver]

DebW,

It enrages me that you are having funding difficulties in atmospheric science. That is only one of the most critical feilds right now, with global warming. (Oh pardon me, It's not proven yet.)

I was studying Environmental Science, but got too depressed. I'd write papers and learn things that I really didn;t want to know about, and not have solutions for problems. I went back to math. I still have problems with depression, but at least math lets me escape from worrying about the world.

I understand your remembering everything about bikes. I am the same way with biology, especially names of plants.

Mary