Dmitry- The Raleigh 26tpi head sets were touchy on a couple of points. As the alignment of the bearing contacts are almost completely vertical, the head tube end face squareness is more critical then angular contact bearings (which most of the classic head sets use). I don't remember the cups' and crown press fit diameter and whether it is the same as Campy (which most head tube reamers use) but this should be checked out first. Like I said before the tools only remove material and you don't want to take off too much of the head tube's inner diameter and make a press fit into a slip fit. You can do a face only operation with a machinist's square and a hand file if you're good with hand tools. The second issue with the 26tpi head sets is that they're very sensitive to the ball count. IIRC the lower stack used one more ball then the upper and there would be about a ball and half of space when you had the correct count. We found many Raleighs had the wrong count right out of the box. For all the take apart and corrections I've done you'd think I'd remember the ball counts (23 lower and 22 upper?), but it has been many years since then. Some times the actual cup or race was miss stamped (I don't thing the bearing surface was machined or ground) and we would replace with a low cost angle contact one and the results would always be far better then the 26tpi even when set up "right". This was one of the Raleigh quirks that always bothered me.
> Andrew,
>
> Thanks for your reply. The particular situation at hand is a Raleigh
> threaded (26 tpi) headset on an old frame that I'm building up - I
> can't adjust it properly, it is either too loose or binds at some
> points. I suspect that improperly faced headtube is the reason. While
> I do understand that I can take the frame to an LBS and have the
> headtube checked/faced if needed - I'm thinking that perhaps this is a
> good excuse to get myself a facing tool instead. (Besides, I don't
> like/trust my LBS too much.) (FWIW I have installed/changed a few
> headsets before without facing the tubes - it mostly worked out just
> fine but in one other case at least, I think facing the headtube
> would've also made things smoother.)
>
Andrew R Stewart
Rochester, NY