>First, it has a splined driver, allowing easy sprocket
>interchangeability. I'm not sure when this was introduced on the
>"standard" hubs, but it is shown that way in the S/A catalog I have,
>which has a 1956 price sheet bound in. My 1950 ASC came with the
>older threaded driver, but the splined driver is a slip-in
>replacement. Splined cogs are pretty abundant still (Of course, the
>older threaded drivers used the same threading as freewheels, so
>they were the basis for the Cyclo "3x2," "3x3" and similar
>conversions. Sheldon Brown treats these on his site).
i had noticed this splined driver, and was wondering about it - id only seen the threaded ones before...
my main fear would be stripping the cog, cause those 3 tabs are *not* enough to hold a cog under torque for that long, especially given the little bit of slop that is always there with the spacers... i spin cogs on my s-a aw hub about once every 9-12 months - the nubs just shear right off. granted, i put a *lot* of miles onto mine, but thats something id worry about with a fixed gear hub... id much rather have the threaded driver or a 12-spline like the tf (i think...) ive actually even considered switching to a threaded driver on my aw, but i only have one of them, and track cogs are way more expensive than sturmey cogs (last time i walked into the used bike store, i bought 6 16t s-a cogs for what i wouldve had to pay for a nice 16t track cog...)
im guessing they might have switched over to the 3-spline driver to reduce the total number of parts they had to make for all their hubs, perhaps because of lagging sales of the asc near the end of its production? just a guess... cause if i were using one of these for time trialing (common usage for the fixed s-a hubs), spinning a cog would the last thing id want...
-joel
--
joel metz : magpie@messengers.org : http://www.blackbirdsf.org/
i know what innocence looks like - and it wasn't there,
after she got that bicycle...