Freewheel Hub

do you mean to say the freewheel and block unscrew from the hub, and the axle and right hand ball bearings stay in the hub?

garage sale GT said:

do you mean to say the freewheel and block unscrew from the hub, and the axle and right hand ball bearings stay in the hub?

Cheers for replying, Halfords in the end gave me a whole new wheel because they had never come across the set up on my bike. The freehub body was actually threaded and screwed into the hub. The axle removed as normal. Im new to this game so my terminology is probably wrong.

ntmtb said:

Im new to this game so my terminology is probably wrong.

You might want to have a look at Sheldon Brown and get that sorted.

ntmtb said:

Halfords in the end gave me a whole new wheel because they had never come across the set up on my bike.

Doesn't say anything good about the bike shop if they're selling stuff they don't recognize themselves...

Quoted post said:

The freehub body was actually threaded and screwed into the hub.

Basicallly you have two designs, freehubs and freewheels. Frewheels are sold with the sprocket and ratcheting mechanism as one piece, (although they can be separated if you're stubborn enough, not much point though, since sprockets or ratchet isn't available separately) Freewheels do screw on to the hub.
In freehubs OTOH the ratchet mechanism (the body) are handled separately from the sprockets, and is bolted on to the hub using a special tubular bolt.

I answered the post despite the late date because those freewheel hubs are one of my pet peeves.

The axle is so easy to bend because the ball bearings have to be inboard of the freewheel, so the hub puts a great deal of bending moment on the axle. Yet they never improved the design by going up to a 12 or 14 mm axle.

The new style freehubs were developed by Maillard, Campy, Shimano and others in the late '70s and early 80's and filtered down to all but the cheapest bikes by the '90s. Besides making sprockets easy to change they have their ball bearings all the way out at the end, just inside the frame of the bike.

Halfords must be a mass market department store. They must carry a lot of Chinese chrome steel. Unless you have some totally different, exotic style of hub. If you had a freewheel hub, then you had male threads just outside the right hand spoke flange which were exactly the same size and pitch as a standard (english) bottom bracket.