Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Raleigh Sprite 5 Speed Beat Down...

Along with the 1938 Cadillac, I have a late 1960s Raleigh Sprite 5 speed project in the Shed. I received this project last week and was hoping to clean it up and run it as a "high performance" version of the Raleigh Sports, which really is what the 5 speed version of the Sprite was.

Unfortunately, Fed Ex roughly handled the two boxes making up this project. This included punching the axles of the wheels through their box, to the point the non-drive side bell crank was hanging out of a box and was ground against the shipping equipment down to almost nothing. The damage is visible in the pictures. The bell crank should be a long domed nut, the same on each side. Fed Ex managed to grind half of it off.  They also bent the S5 hub's push rod that matches up to the bell crank.















In short, they really made a mess of this.












Other pictures show extensive damage to the boxes. They also managed to bend the chainring and bash-up one of the front axle "R" nuts. The "core" of the bike seems to have done OK though.








The result of this is a Fed Ex claim for damages, which will reportedly soon be processed. I'm not optimistic. They'll probably try to dodge out of this and blame the shipper, which is something I think unfair.








So I guess I need a Sturmey Archer S5 bell crank and possibly a push rod. I may also need a chain ring, though that might ultimately be fixable.