Vintage Bicycle Hubs

Video Transcript

"Another way to determine the age of your vintage bicycle is by looking at the rear hub. See here I've got a coaster brake rear hub. The brand is Bendix. It's a very popular brand of coaster brake hubs. What makes this hub unique and dates it probably into the 1930s is these fins on the hubs. Most hubs today don't have that, and also you'll have a nice oil port here so that you can oil your hub. Another thing that dates this hub as being very old is look at the sprocket. It's called a skip tooth sprocket. If you look at today's sprockets there are spikes evenly all the way around, but these in the early days, they used a skip tooth sprocket. Again this is Bendix. Now here's a later Bendix hub. This is from the 1970s. It's got a red band that means it's a single speed. They also had yellow, triple bands and blue bands. Those are two speed hubs. Now some Bendix hubs also have a date here on the brake arm. This one does not happen to have that date. Another way to date a hub - this is a standard Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub. You can find it on an English bicycle, and there's a two digit date code here. 71, that means 1971."