# Raleigh cotter nut and a factory goof



## Andrew Gorman (May 3, 2014)

Just playing with a 1974 Raleigh Sport , I noticed that a metric 7X1mm nut will work on the 1/4 X 26 TPI Raleigh made, Raleigh specific crank cotters.  Good news for me since I wanted to keep the nice "R" marked nuts for a future project. I'll have to see if other 1mm pitch/26.4 TPI nuts work on 26 TPI Raleigh parts.  Also, I noticed that the frame this bike had been originally painted green, and then repainted brown by the factory.  The fork was always brown.  That kind of thing would never happen now with "just in time" delivery.  Oops, too many orders for brown bikes, let's repaint some excess stock.  Raleigh was just so darn big they thought they could get away with doing things that way... Britain in the 1970's was a very strange place.


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## SirMike1983 (May 4, 2014)

Sometimes the metric parts work and sometimes they don't. I tried to use a metric bolt to secure a chain case to a Raleigh Dawn. It would go in and turn fine until you went to put pressure on it, then it would skip out of thread. You have to try each bolt individually to see if it will work for whatever application is at hand. I think of it as a "hand fit" item. 

The "R" nuts are somewhat more highly sought after than even the earlier ones. One of those Raleigh branding things, I guess. I've found the quality of the earlier Raleigh nuts from the 1950s is actually better, even if they don't have the "R" on them. The later ones seem a bit softer steel, though they do have the nice "R" touch.

Raleigh's production model allowed them to do stuff like re-paint frames. Today many bicycle factories really are no more than assembly plants where contract-built parts are brought in and assembled. Raleigh was the opposite. They tried to do as much in-house, in a centralized factory as they could. This gave them the ability to  change colors/components/etc. They had the facilities to do what they pleased. When you're not relying on contract vendors much and you're doing a lot in-house, you have a lot of freedom to mess around with stuff, assuming you can keep it economically feasible. 

Sometimes Raleigh and Sturmey Archer would play fast and loose with components and assembly. An example might well be simply repainting a frame to meet color needs. At Sturmey Archer, they would often allow for parts tolerances that would be surprising to a modern shop today. In fact, when Sun Race (Taiwan) bought Sturmey Archer and took possession of the machinery, they found the English quality control people were letting a lot of stuff with very loose tolerances though. Sun Race actually had difficulty turning out Sturmey Archer hubs at first, because the machines were generating tolerances too wide for Sun Race's liking. Sturmey Archer England evidently did not have a problem with the tolerances being generated. The attitude apparently was that so long as it essentially functioned, it was fine. Sun Race wanted tighter tolerances and was disappointed by what the SA machinery was able to produce.

Sheldon Brown wrote that a veteran Sturmey Archer employee once told him:



> Back in the day, sometimes a batch of internal parts would be just a bit out of tolerance, maybe a bit too small, or a bit too large, whatever. The production people would take a sample to the engineering department, where a grey-haired engineer would check it out and often say "Well, it is a bit out of spec, but not really enough to cause failure, so let's let it go."
> 
> SunRace didn't have those engineers who had grown up with Sturmey-Archer in their blood, so when they found a batch of out-of-spec parts, they would say "That's out of spec! Melt it down, and make new ones, and do it right this time!"





1970s Raleigh Sports are decent bikes. The quality of the 1940s and 50s bikes is much greater, but the 1970s 3 speeds are still pretty solid, attractive bikes. Raleigh's quality declined during the 1960s and into the 1970s. They still made decent bikes, but if you roll a 1955 Raleigh Sports and a 1975 Raleigh Sports next to each other, you'll notice the cuts that went on.

I have a 1974 Bronze Green Sports that I've ridden regularly for 11 years now. Great bikes even if not as posh as the earlier ones.


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