Bearing cup is finally loose!

After about a month of thumping on that poor hub every time I had a new idea, we finally got it unscrewed and the gears removed. Yay!

I say "we" because it took two of us again. I held the wheel while David wielded the lock ring wrench.

Yep, not the drift punch that all the manuals call for. The drift punch and earlier substitutes weren't transfering enough force to even turn the wheel, and it was almost impossible to get it into the groove without catching the head of the nearest spoke. The wrench allowed us to position the "push points" more precisely and not bounce them around with hammer blows. Actually, the ideal tool would have been a ring with teeth to fit into those grooves and a handle to smack with the hammer, possibly with a cup to screw onto the axle to hold it in place -- like the thing I think of as a "tin can tool" that holds the wrench in place on the bottom bracket, but with a slightly different shape. And maybe another clamp-y tool to keep the wheel from turning. Toolsmithing turned out to be unnecessary (and a good thing, too, since I have neither the tools nor the skill), since I had the use of a large man with strong hands and the right angle for the vise (it's a tad high for me).

And now I get retainer bearings. Except the official parts list says it's a 7 X 1/4" and the one I took out had eight bearings in it. So more research there: did the part change or did someone substitute what s/he had on hand as close enough?

But at least now I can take the hub with me to shop for an index chain without toting the whole wheel all over town.

Oh, and the guy at Deschutes (really should learn their names better, bad me) tells me that what I have is definitely a plain AW hub, not the AW Mark II that I thought it might be. The two little lines stamped on the hub shell are probably an eleven and mean it was made in November of 1964, or, when I was about a year and a half old.

So, here's what I have so far:

The importance of light

Found the %*#! ball cup and the slot to hammer on to unscrew it!

The instruction drawings and photos led me to expect the ring I was looking for to be right against the next layer in (think that's one of the dust caps), and possibly a step lower. Then, the actual ring was under a thick velvety coat of grime and looked like part of the flange; the seam where the pieces join was completely obscured and the slots were nearly invisible.

What the internet said:

What Glenn's Manual said:

What I actually had:

In better light:

Complicating the issue, my "shop" is actually one end of what's supposed to be my apartment's living room. I'll spare you the full rant about living room design; the bottom line is, most of my working light comes from a forehead-mounted flashlight thing. Once I took the wheel into my actual living room (meant to be the bedroom, with a nice ceiling light and south-facing window) to compare with the photo in the *manual, I could barely see the slots. Next step will definitely be to clean the outside of the hub so I can see what I'm doing.