Removing the Rear Wheel and: It's a Date!

Yesterday, armed with better Googling and after taking a nice good look at the bike itself, I took off the rear wheel with it's Strumey Archer 3-speed hub.

With actual information on my side, it was really fairly easy.

Looking at the wheel, it's fairly obvious that the geared hub is a real and true hub (with spokes attached), not something that attached to the hub--my choices were to either remove the spokes and later rebuild the wheel (not what I had in mind) or find out how the cable detaches from the hub, preferably without having to reassemble or recalibrate the hub mechanism.

And since this is a bike we're talking about here, and especially since removing the rear wheel is something that has to be done to, say, fix a flat tire and other basics like that, there must be a fairly sensible way, right?

The key for me was finding this sentence on this site, "If you have a Sturmey-Archer, put the shifter in high (3) gear position. Unscrew the cable from the tiny chain. Ignoring the little chain, you now loosen the axle nuts and remove the wheel."  Ok, I have the cable attached to a small chain, complete with what looks like grips to unscrew:

Took me a bit to figure out that the larger and smaller gripped pieces weren't one piece that unscrewed from the threaded part, but actually the larger one is a counter nut that holds the thinner piece where it's calibrated and it's the thinner piece that unscrews:

So, after that was taken care of, it was easy enough to remove the wheel with a wrench and get to work cleaning it.

The hub was not really tarnished, just completely covered with oil and/or grease and grit: 

Used some soapy water and a toothbrush for most of it (hub, nearby spokes, and external gear), which worked nicely, and followed up with a rag and again the toothbrush moistened with some degreaser (I was wary about the degreaser finding its way into the hub and messing everything up)--came out nice and shiny, really pretty!  Behold:

And, finally, I have a more solid date for this bike.  The hub is stamped 73 for 1973--and there we have it, a 1973 Columbia Sports III.

(yes, this 1973:

From Mr. Columbia's site

pretty cute in an early 1970's kind of way)

And while I was working on the hub, A was finishing up the front wheel:

which is now completely shiny and beautiful--still lots to do on the bike, but all and all a good day.