The secret is Fully Enclosed

This group of files is based on the official Sturmey-Archer service manuals from the 1950s. These pages were originated on the Web by Jane Thomas, and I have added them to this site with her kind permission. I have taken the liberty of re-formatting them and have also added and updated the original material with some of my own comments and photos.

For more information on the models covered here as well as more recent Sun Race/Sturmey-Archer models, see the updates on this site on

• 3-speeds
• 4-, 5- and 7-speeds
• 8-speeds.

Those pages link to multiple sources of information.

The official Sturmey-Archer Web site covers current models

Sturmey-Archer changed their part numbering system a loooooong time ago. Many of the part numbers shown in these pages are the extinct numbers, and refer to parts that are no longer available in any case.

All currently available Sturmey-Archer parts have numbers beginning with the letter "H". When you see a "K" part number, you can be pretty sure that the part referred to is no longer available.

Use and Maintenance

General Dismantling; General Re-assembling - read these first, as they describe the first stages before the individual dismantlings and reassemblies for the older models.

Cable replacement-trigger shifters

Sturmey's ever popular robust 3-speed AW Hub

The 4-speed FW Hub as favoured by Dr. Moulton in the '60's

From a very greasy page in the manual the AG 3-speed hub and Dynohub.

A new section very kindly supplied by Andrew Pattle from The Cycling Book of Maintenance - how to deal with BSA hubs. Some consider these superior to S-A hubs although they are based on an early Sturmey design.

For the more up-to-date among us, a new section on the S3C Tricoaster 3-speed hub and coaster brake.

Hurrah! The nice man at Sturmey Archer has sent me bags of new stuff. Sprinter and Sprinter Elite 5-speed hubs.

Fault diagnosis chart for the above - it may be relevant to other hubs, but I haven't got around to reading them all yet.

Goodness knows why I started doing this, but I'm quite pleased with it now I've done it. I got horribly confused the first time I dismantled a Sturmey Archer hub trying to remember the names of all the bits. I hope this helps all you first timers out there...Parts and names.

Sheldon Brown has constructed an enormous web-site absolutely bursting with information. If you want more stuff than you can shake a stick at just whiz off to his pages : Sheldon Brown He has also agreed to put a mirror of the Sturmey Archer information on his site, as I felt it would be found by more people there.

Following many requests for Sturmey-Archer contact addresses, Chris watched the service video right to the end, and spent a happy 10 minutes playing with the pause button. We hope you find this little lot useful.

Great news! Sturmey-Archer are on the web at last - Anything you want to know on current production models, but not a lot on the older stuff - just stay here for that!

If you want to know about folding bikes, or indeed many other types of bikes, you could do worse than having a look at : The excellent A2B website

And the Sturmey-Archer guru himself: Tony Hadland. Tony now has the entire 1956 service manual available in Acrobat format.