On 8/3/2020 3:52 PM, AMuzi wrote:

snip

I assume that, despite claims here on RBT, there just wasn't enough
volume to sustain their well designed well made but esoteric bicycle
designs.Â* All the gearboxes made in a year don't equal a day of Shimano
derailleur production.

I see a lot of broken things but gearbox broken axles are not among
them. Freewheel hub axles yes, all the while.

[1]girlfriend's uncle brought one home. It's hanging on her wall. This
one's a different era for a different army but you get the idea:
https://static-img.gunstar.co.uk/adp...927529_img.jpg

This all happened so long ago that it's not possible to get into the
heads of the designers.

If I were to guess, they decided to increase the axle diameter to the
minimum required to achieve sufficient strength and avoid broken axles,
because they didn't want the rear dropout diameter to increase too much.
Sure they could have gone to 11mm but that's not a standard either,
they'd have had to go to 12mm/1.25mm pitch.

There was really no downside in using 10.5mm/26TPI at the time. There
are still a lot of those Dual-Drive SRAM hubs in use. Even my next-door
neighbor, not a bike person, has a folding bicycle with a Dual-Drive
hub. A great many Bike Fridays also used those hubs.