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.

So how old are you, anyway?

With this bike, good question.

Now that this bike is ours, I've been doing a lot of Googling, trying to learn as much as I can about the bike and what to do with it.  Lots and lots of information out there, but there are lots and lots of bikes in this world and info specific to the early 1970's Raleigh Sport III is not complete enough to make this easy!

The first letter and number on the serial number are either rusted up or gunked up (guess we'll find out which in time) but it appears to start with P8 or P9, which, going by Mr. Columbia's excellent site would seem to make it after 1972.

The Old Roads website here has a picture of the same bike:

from OldRoads.com

labeled as 1975--only problem is that I was there when the bike was purchased and used and it couldn't have been 1975 for our bike!

Basically, it had to have been sometime after 1971 when we moved to the location where we bought the bike, sometime before 1975 when my little brother was born, and most likely some time when I was still small enough to fit in the little tartan child seat that I distinctly remember sitting in on the back of that bike--most likely by 1973 or earlier in 1974.  I was never a tall kid, but still I'm pretty sure I was out of the child seat by the time I hit kindergarten.

Just today I read that the Sturmey-Archer hubs used on these bikes (see how much I learned--laugh if you must, but when we first dug the bike out of the garage was the first time I noticed that the bike didn't have visible gears and it was a distinctly "what the heck?" moment), but anyway, the hubs used on these bikes may have their own stamp indicating the date--not able to go take a look now, but my inner Nancy Drew is itching!