Free Wheely

First diagnose of our patient revealed very wobbly chain rings on both the captain as the stokers position. You could quite easily push the chain rings half a centimeter out of the chain line. On closer inspection it seemed to be caused by the Dicta brass freewheels. Not wanting to replace the chain line every 5 kilometers we decided to investigate the availability of somewhat more qualitative freewheels on the world wide web. Sickbikeparts sells ENO heavy duty freewheels, tempted by their shiny look we ordered them immediately.

I must say, it was quite some trouble to get them properly installed. The ENO freewheel has M5 holes and our spider has M6 bolts so we had to adapt one or the other to make the whole thing fit. We started of by trying to drill a hole in the freewheel, broke our drill and didn’t even manage to scratch the surface. As luck would have it, we have a mechanical department just 40 meters from my desk at KU Leuven, hooray! Those guys have somewhat the same equipment in their lab, but always at least thrice as big and twice as durable. Their column drilling machine was quite a showoff and they had carbide tipped drills but only managed to produce more sparks and no hole, the concept of heavy duty started dripping in. After searching half an hour for cobalt drills we decided to give up and adjust the spider instead of the heavy duty freewheel. We drilled some new holes, freed up some space with the lathe for a better fitting and we are very happy with the result. No more wobbly chain rings and a solid ratchet sound, we love it.