I almost gave up yesterday. Just sick of people lying. Why? had he been honest I wouldn't have bought them.
Obviously now I had a huge problem. A new Profile axle is about ?60. One with the bolts and shoulders? over ?100. That means the ?45 I paid? I could have bought some new school GDH. The bolts are 3/8 24 TPI, meaning nowhere in the UK just stocks normal bolts in that size. Meaning you have to go to them.
After speaking with my friend who has a hobbyist machine setup in his garage we came up with a plan. I got out my vernier, and the bolt hole depth is 28mm. So basically Profile bolts are probably 30mm or less (they sit on 5mm shoulders like this)
That was obviously the second problem we needed to tackle though. The first was saving the axle. I was concerned he may not have the hardware to work on toughened 4130. So then I got totally schooled. I mean, this dude even knows the chemical names for this stuff. Like, the actual steel, how it's made up and even its stock value
So he sent me this picture to ease my concerns.
So I'm like "Oh hey nice drill bits man". Only then he told me that is his collection of carbide and cobalt. The latter will eat through anything you feed it. So, I then hatched a plan. He was talking about helicoils and etc, I don't like the idea of that. I know Profile do a hollow cro mo axle. I know because it's about ?80. So the idea I had goes like this. Bore out the original holes completely (the 3/8 24 TPI) to 10.5MM. Made them through holes. Bore into the arm another 30mm, tap to M10. Then use 60mm bolts.
Which he said was probably the easiest way to go about it, rather than trying to put back threads that were destroyed. The only thing left to do then was vernier the shoulders I will need.
Get him to throw it into 3d to make sure it looks right and then basically just send the axle to him. Then order some bolts.
As you can see, the price is a lot keener than ?35.
I degreased the cranks and axle yesterday. Whilst there I found a stamp saying "USA". So these are unstamped Profile. Not only are they unstamped older cranks, but they are bipolar. IE, they have a sprocket mount both sides. Which, makes them quite rare tbh. Pretty sure I can fix the dents. The degreaser took off some of the crappy paint too.
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