My Shaft Drive Bike

landotter wrote:
Tosspot wrote:

bill wrote:

it looks like a commuter to me: thick tyres, block pedals with no
clips, and very high bars.

peers again Hmmmm...Mutton dressed as lamb then. Interesting though
(I'm geeky). Wonder how long that shaft lasts.


You just know that the people at Ronco are looking to merge this with
their Rotisserie oven.

http://static.flickr.com/141/317283412_d1b6a1f156_o.jpg

Lol. You're weevil and no mistake.

ShaftMan wrote:
Hi Group,

I've read the previous posts on shaft drive bikes, but never knew
anybody that actually owned one. I have a shaft drive road bike.

See http://i11.tinypic.com/2qwegi0.jpg

It looks really cool actually. Like everyone else, I'm curious what the
life expectancy will be for the shaft. Post back with updates for the
curious.

Question: Is the shifter indeed part of the brifter lever like it looks
in the picture? If so, is it a shimano lever, and are both the levers
the same brand and shape?


Yes....made in the 21st century. I'm having a blast with it. My
complaint
with the bike has nothing to do with the shaft drive, but with the
Shimano
Nexus, 7 speed hub transmission. I need it to have a lower gear ratio
for hill
climbing. I can easily swap the shaft/gear to a lower ratio for $79 and
lower
the top end too.........or just get stronger.

Happy trails.

ShaftMan

ShaftMan wrote:
Hi Group,

I've read the previous posts on shaft drive bikes, but never knew
anybody that actually owned one. I have a shaft drive road bike.

See http://i11.tinypic.com/2qwegi0.jpg

It looks really cool actually. Like everyone else, I'm curious what the
life expectancy will be for the shaft. Post back with updates for the
curious.

Question: Is the shifter indeed part of the brifter lever like it looks
in the picture? If so, is it a shimano lever, and are both the levers
the same brand and shape?


Yes....made in the 21st century. I'm having a blast with it. My
complaint
with the bike has nothing to do with the shaft drive, but with the
Shimano
Nexus, 7 speed hub transmission. I need it to have a lower gear ratio
for hill
climbing. I can easily swap the shaft/gear to a lower ratio for $79 and
lower
the top end too.........or just get stronger.

Happy trails.

ShaftMan

ShaftMan wrote:
Hi Group,

I've read the previous posts on shaft drive bikes, but never knew
anybody that actually owned one. I have a shaft drive road bike.

See http://i11.tinypic.com/2qwegi0.jpg

It looks really cool actually. Like everyone else, I'm curious what the
life expectancy will be for the shaft. Post back with updates for the
curious.

Question: Is the shifter indeed part of the brifter lever like it looks
in the picture? If so, is it a shimano lever, and are both the levers
the same brand and shape?


Yes....made in the 21st century. I'm having a blast with it. My
complaint
with the bike has nothing to do with the shaft drive, but with the
Shimano
Nexus, 7 speed hub transmission. I need it to have a lower gear ratio
for hill
climbing. I can easily swap the shaft/gear to a lower ratio for $79 and
lower
the top end too.........or just get stronger.

Happy trails.

ShaftMan

Hi Jobst and the Group,

As far as the drive shaft twisting......I stand on the pedals with
my 200 pounds of pizza and beer and I don't feel any twist.

I am inspecting the bevel gears regularly. So far...after removing
the cover and wiping away the green grease..... the gears
look good. Give me a year.

It's fun to lube the bottom bracket gears and rear gears with a grease
gun.
I use green, PennzoiI Marine grease. Just call me Mr. Goodwrench!

Cheers.

ShaftMan


wrote:
Shaft Man? writes:

I've read the previous posts on shaft drive bikes, but never knew
anybody that actually owned one. I have a shaft drive road bike:

http://i11.tinypic.com/2qwegi0.jpg

Yes... Made in the 21st century. I'm having a blast with it. My
complaint with the bike has nothing to do with the shaft drive, but
with the Shimano Nexus, 7-speed hub transmission. I need a lower
ratio for hill climbing. Although I can easily swap the shaft/gear
to a lower ratio for $79, it would also lower the top end... or
should I just get stronger.

So how much of a springboard is the pedal when climbing hills
standing. That looks like a fine torsion bar drive. I have
difficulty visualizing how the little tiny bevel gears of this system
withstand a couple of hundred miles of stiff pedaling, the kind my
bicycle sees when touring.

How far and where have you ridden on this bicycle?

Jobst Brandt

On 8 Dec 2006 13:26:40 -0800, "Hank Wirtz" wrote:


wrote:

How far did Major Taylor's shaft-drive bicycles last when he was racing
and setting world records?

How far did they need to last? Wasn't he mostly a track racer, doing
flat races that were only a couple of miles, if that?

Dear Hank,

Major Taylor rode everything from 1,700-mile 6-day endurance track
races to 1,000 meter and 1-mile standing-start sprints with 30-yard
handicaps.

(It's not easy to pin down which races were run with chain and which
with chainless, as shaft-drive was called, a useful term to know if
you ever find yourself grovelling through indexes and wondering why
there's nothing about shaft-drive.)

On page 114, Andrew Ritchie's biography of Major Taylor mentions a
20-lb Stearns bike with a Sager chainless drive, using an 88-inch gear
for sprints and a 120-inch gear for longer paced races and record
attempts behind steam-engine pacers.

Lamentably, the biography is practically silent about the technical
side of things, possibly because the details have been lost. But I
recall no mention of mechanical failures or lost races connected with
the chainless drive:

"He [Harry Sager] wanted him [Major Taylor] to test and promote his
invention by breaking records on it. In the intense competition for
technological development in the bicycle industry and the battle for
the American consumer's dollar, the chainless bicycle offered a bright
new possibility, and there was extended discussion in the cycling
press about its advantages and disadvantages. The main benefit it
offered, at a time when roads were dusty and muddy, was a totally
enclosed transmission, which would not become clogged and damaged by
dirt or need constant cleaning. [35]

"35. The chainless bicycle made its appearance in 1898 and 1899 and
enjoyed a brief popularity before fading and disappearing. Many
manufacturers came up with a chainless design at that time, hoping to
woo new adherents and popularize the new idea. It never became a
serious rival to the conventional chain-driven bicycle. The chainless
mechanism was essentially a shaft with pinions at each end. The main
advantage of the chainless was that its enclosed mechanism stayed
clean and well-oiled even under the dirtiest road conditions. Its
disadvantages were that the rear wheel of the bicycle was more
difficult to remove and the gearing could not be easily changed."

--"Major Taylor," p. 108 & 274

Taylor moved from chain to chainless and then gradually back to chain.

"Early in June [1900], Taylor and Ellingham [Taylor's trainer] went to
the Iver Johnson [Arms and Cycle Works] factory in Fitchburg
[Massachusetts] to see about making some new bicycles. They decided
that Taylor should give up riding the chainless bicycle, which was
good for fast high-gear riding behind a pacing machine but
inapppropriate for the short-distance sprinting he would concentrate
on during the remainder of 1900.

Alas, there's no hint as to why chainless was inappropriate for
sprinting, even though Taylor won numerous sprints with a chainless.
It's a nice biography, but a wretched technical history.

Frank Berto's "Dancing Chain" mentions no reliability problems in its
brief comment on shaft-drive:

"Early bicycle chains had problems. Shaft-drive eliminated troublesome
greasy chains and gave the bicycle a neat appearance. The French
bicycle company L'Acatene was the major devloper of the shaft-drive in
the 1890s. The French word acatene (chainless) was used to describe
chainless bicycles. There were numerous French shaft-drive bicycles.
Some had two or even three speeds."

"By 1897, the prices of U.S. chain-driven safety bicycles had fallen
dramatically. Columbia saw shaft-drive as a way to provide uniqueness.
They introduced the Columbia Chainless with great fanfare. Sales were
small, however, because the 1898 shaft drive model cost $125 (about
$6,000 in today's dollars), when the top-of-the-line Columbia
chain-drive cost only $75.00. The 1899 Overman Victor Chainless used
spin-rollers to reduce the cost, but it did not survive either.
L'Acatene and Columbia shaft-drives are shown on page 69."

"Shaft-drives are an elegant alternative to chains. Shaft drives
require precision-cut bevel gears and quality bearings, which makes
them much more expensive than a chain-drive. The spin roller was
cruder and less efficient. The need to remove the rear wheel reduces
precision and makes lubrication of the rear drive more difficult.
Shaft drives have a lower mechanical efficiency than chain drives."

The pictures on page 69 include an exploded view that shows how the
rear wheel was removed.

Another view is captioned, "The elegant 1903 Columbia 2-speed
shaft-drive had neither cables nor chain to clutter its appearance.
When the rider backpedaled a quarter turn, the other set of cogs
clicked into place. The 2-speed mdoel included front suspension and a
coaster brake, and it cost $100, or $75 for the single-speed."

[How a coaster brake was combined with a quarter-back-turn 2-speed
gear shift puzzles me.]

More pictures mention that high gear was 92 inches and low gear was 68
inches, while showing some gears.

--Berto, "Dancing Chain," 2nd edition, p. 359

Archibald Sharp's 1896 "Bicycles and Tricycles" shows no sign of
having heard of the French shaft drives that Berto mentions and
dismisses the whole absurd notion:

"This form of gear, or its equivalent hyperboloid skew-bevel gear, has
not been used to any great extent in cycle construction, and will
therefore not be discussed in the present work." (p. 435)

Take that, you snail-chewing, shaft-driving, hyerboloid scoundrels!

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Fri, 08 Dec 2006 18:35:17 -0700, wrote:

[snip]

Oops, missed a brief but interesting comment:

"Some early safety bicycles used shaft drive in place of a chain, with
a right-angle bevel-gear set at the crank and at the rear wheel
(figure 11.17 [Pierce shaft-drive bicycle with sprung rear wheel,
1900]). These drives had a neat, compact appearnace, but were heavier,
less efficient, and much more expensive than chain drive."

"In the period around 1897, most American manufacturers produced at
least one shaft-drive model. Tests showed that the losses could be as
high as 8%, probably because the machining of bevel gears was not very
precise. The Waltham Orient pattern using roller pins instead of
machined teeth performed well, however, and Major Taylor broke many
records using this transmission."

--"Bicycling Science," Rowland and Wilson, 2nd edition, p. 297-298

Curiously, the figure "as much as 8%" is about what modern tests show
for derailleur chain losses. As for the roller pins versus bevel
gears, perhaps someone else will dig up some details.

CF

The manufacturer of the bike mentioned by the OP has a Website, lots of
breathless prose and a slightly crude animated demonstration of the
chainless drive used. Since no measurements are given, it looks like
the drive shaft could be as small as 1 cm in diameter or as large as a
couple cm.

This has always been one of those things that I wished worked, or at
least wish worked better than current derailleur systems. It looks
nifty and maintenance would be a breeze. But at least historically the
losses in the drive gears and the internally geared hubs has much
exceeded that of a derailleur system.

In article ,
wrote:

On 8 Dec 2006 13:26:40 -0800, "Hank Wirtz" wrote:


wrote:

How far did Major Taylor's shaft-drive bicycles last when he was
racing and setting world records?

How far did they need to last? Wasn't he mostly a track racer, doing
flat races that were only a couple of miles, if that?

Dear Hank,

Major Taylor rode everything from 1,700-mile 6-day endurance track
races to 1,000 meter and 1-mile standing-start sprints with 30-yard
handicaps.

(It's not easy to pin down which races were run with chain and which
with chainless, as shaft-drive was called, a useful term to know if
you ever find yourself grovelling through indexes and wondering why
there's nothing about shaft-drive.)

On page 114, Andrew Ritchie's biography of Major Taylor mentions a
20-lb Stearns bike with a Sager chainless drive, using an 88-inch
gear for sprints and a 120-inch gear for longer paced races and
record attempts behind steam-engine pacers.

Reportedly the patent protection for the Sager drive has expired, and
externally at least the resemblance is remarkable between Major Taylor's
chainless drive and that on the OP's bike.

Hi Werehatrack and the Group,

Thanks for the idea. I shot a letter off to Schlumpf to see
if their 2 speed bottom bracket could be integrated into my
shaft drive bike.

So far, the only mods I have made on my shaft drive bike
were to install clipless pedals and a rear zerk fitting, just like
the BB zerk fitting. Now the green marine grease goes in
easier.

Cheers.

ShaftMan


Werehatrack wrote:
On 8 Dec 2006 09:51:46 -0800, "ShaftMan" wrote:

Hi Group,

I've read the previous posts on shaft drive bikes, but never knew
anybody that actually owned one. I have a shaft drive road bike.

See http://i11.tinypic.com/2qwegi0.jpg

Yes....made in the 21st century. I'm having a blast with it. My
complaint
with the bike has nothing to do with the shaft drive, but with the
Shimano
Nexus, 7 speed hub transmission. I need it to have a lower gear ratio
for hill
climbing. I can easily swap the shaft/gear to a lower ratio for $79 and
lower
the top end too.........or just get stronger.

Why not contact Schlumpf and see if they could buld a two-speed BB to
mate with the front gearbox?
--
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