Torrington Pedals

The Schwinn New World still needs a pedal rebuild. With it cold and snowy today, I did some work refreshing them.

Torrington #8 and #10 pedals are deceptively simple. They are composed of, basically, an axle with a dog bone shaped casing over it, where the cups on each end of the bone-shaped casing contain the ball bearing cages. The axle has a fixed cone at the hilt and a screw-on cone at the end. Adjustment is made by tightening or loosening the cone nut. A lock nut and keyed spacer lock the cone nut in place.

Outside that core, there is the outer frame, which has a set of fixed pins and a pair of rubber blocks. This bolts to the inner frame which goes directly on the axle.  The picture below shows a #10 pedal taken apart for cleaning.

In this case I had to replace one pedal axle that was bent. Luckily, I had a set of worn #8s with straight axles around, so I swapped the bent axle for a straight one. It is important to remember that pedals have different threads, depending on which side of the bike they go on. These Torringtons have an "L" and an "R" on the hilt of the pedal axle. Obviously, one right and one left. Remember too, the left pedal is REVERSE threaded, so that it tightens by turning counter clockwise rather than clockwise. The right pedal is standard thread.

I lubricate the bearings with a mixture of lithium grease and medium weight oil. I like thinned grease because these really need to be able to roll freely to get a good ride. Caking on thick axle grease just gums them up. Instead, I use a mixture of thinned brown lithium grease and 50 weight motor oil.

Once they are reassembled, they don't look bad. Hopefully these will spin as nicely as I hope they will, and shall provide many more years of good service on the 1947 Schwinn New World.