a question for any owners of graphite tuff wheels with campy hubs:

i am trying to replace a rear axle on a graphite tuff wheel, it has the old style (non sealed) campagnolo hubs and is the flip-flop variety.

the wheel had no axle or hardware when i got it so i am kind of going in the dark on this one. i have a good supply of old school campy stuffs, track axles etc. so i can fix this thing (i think). the trouble is that the two sides use different sizes of bearings and cones, 1/4" on the right side and 7/32" on the left. the 1/4" is standard dimenson for campy rear hubs and the 7/32" is standard on fronts. the rear hubs usually (to the best of my experience) use a 10mm x 26 axle while the fronts use a 9mm x 26.

my question is, what is the correct axle dimension (diameter x pitch) for the rear flip flop graphite? the dust caps are two different sizes as well. the right side is a standard campy rear and the left is from a front hub so a 10mm axle wouldn't seem to work (the 1/4" cone won't pass through the left side dustcap).

does this strange animal use a double threaded axle or am i missing something?

any help and input is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
dave

Hi Dave,

I'll be happy to help you out when I can. My house has been apart for 2mo now everything is piled in boxes haphazardly. I have a set of NOS front/rear axles & set of GTs (none for sale) will be happy to measure for you. Email me in about 2-3 weeks - if you can wait that long - at:
carlrosemd@hotmail.com
This is planned ETA for job completion.

Sorry can't help sooner - no idea where all my parts are buried...! (smile)
As I recall these were Campy track 10x perhaps 1.5 or 1.25 pitch? Check http://www.thethirdhand.com/
as they seem to stock small parts.

quote:

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the 1/4" cone won't pass through the left side dustcap

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Skyway individually ground down the cones for the left side. I asked Ken Coster and he confirmed this.

I had a set of Campy Graphites that I completely rebuilt and I had to have the cone ground down. Its hardened so it won't be easy. I had a machine shop do it for me.

You have the right setup, you just need to now customize it.

This reason and cost is what caused Skyway to switch to a sealed 3/8" setup on the Graphites. Campagnolo wanted big money for the axle setups because of the limited numbers that Skyway needed and the custom work involved..

quote:

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VintageBMX.com: Why did you switch from Campagnolo to your own sealed hub?

KC: Campagnolo is huge, and we thought selling 500-600 sets of Graphite's was enough, but that's nothing to them. Campagnolo was saying to us at one time that the volume was not there. We also decided to leave Campagnolo because of liability. We were afraid, you know, maybe these things weren't strong enough. We had our riders out there testing them, but we still were weary about the Campagnolo components because we had to temper the parts down.

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KC: PK will tell you today that he did that, and he did. He won the nationals with those Graphite's on there. And the rest is history. I mean, because of the expense of the material, they retailed for like $220, $250-and that time, we thought, no, there's not going to be that many people so we thought, "let's do a limited run." They sold out in hours, literally. They had the trick yellow box with the black lettering on the box. We went all out to promote this thing. And we were amazed. We made-John(Raudman) and Chuck(Raudman) and I were down there, by hand making every one of those hubs. A lot of people asked, "why didn't you stick with the Campagnolo hubs?" Campagnolo, they didn't do anything special for us, we had to use what they normally use for the road bikes.

VintageBMX.com: Track axles?

KC: Exactly. But the component parts on that, such as the cone nuts and lock nuts, they were so hard, they were almost brittle, so we had to temper every one of those down so that they would not snap on impact when these kids were out racing or jumping or whatever.

VintageBMX.com: Really?

KC: Oh, yeah. Very costly. And those components were very, very costly.

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Very costly 25 years ago....