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Era of Sturmey Archer hubs with no drive side spring "cap"

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3-speeder

Wore out three sets of tires already!
Hello all. I am working on my ladies '61 Raleigh Superbe with hub dated 61 3. While servicing the S A hub I noticed that the drive-side doesn't have the spring "cap" that I have seen on many of my S A hubs. I have found this before and thought it odd but was fairly certain this item hadn't been lost as it seemed the hub had never been opened. Perhaps this was missing from another early sixties S A hub. Has anyone else found this to be the case from a certain era of S A hubs?

I am attaching an image of the driver and the parts that I cleaned up from the drive side. The part I am speaking of would be a small round cupped "washer" that fit over the end of the spring placed against the bearing cage or cone. I have also checked a spare hub with a 61 date and it too had no spring cap. Is this normal for this time period? Seems to be. I know in the 70's this piece went from metal to plastic.
S A hub driver side parts.jpg
 
The part is K529 "Clutch Spring Cap" or "Spring Cap", depending on which version of parts diagram you are looking at. I have had a few hubs over the years with missing clutch spring caps (maybe a half dozen or so?). The AW parts charts I have, from what I can see, stayed the same (they show the cap in the assembly). I suppose it's possible some of the hubs lacked the caps as a cost-cutting measure in the 1960s, but I've never found the missing cap consistently enough to say for sure they just plain stopped using it for a time. I generally attributed it to people disassembling the hub and losing the cap (or the cap got stuck against the bearings and the person just ditched the cap). The older caps are thin metal (good), followed by white plastic (bad - they often degrade with consistent exposure to oil), and then black plastic (not enough experience to say, but I prefer the metal still). The cap size varies to some degree - the newer AW hubs have a slightly smaller cap, known as HSA129.

Either way, I'd put a cap on that spring now that you have the hub open. I prefer to have a cap on the spring. I know a couple mechanics who think the cap is entirely unnecessary (maybe it is? I've never done a side-by-side test of wear and cap versus no cap). They are more concerned the cap gets trapped up against the bearings and ruins the cone or bearings or both. But I like to follow the diagram and use the cap and a properly fitting cap should not be a problem.
 
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No cap.........no big deal. As long as you can fully screw the adjusting cone down, nothing can reach the bearings, it will work just fine.

I've had a lot of AW's apart, some have the spring cap, some don't. Never paid attention to when it changed. The spring is very important, not the cap.

Another change was the ring that holds the indicator chain pin, some were "one piece", and some were two parts, "a knocked ring and a washer". Both styles work fine.

The AW hub was made for decades, some changes were inevitable.

John
 
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