Restoration of an old Campagnolo H tool

Once in a while one has to do something senseless. Something crazy, indulge a thing, spend money on basically overpriced stuff. So I recently bought a used and retro Campagnolo H tool pair, also known as 'dropout alignment tool' You always need them in a pair, and together they look like a very broad H, hence the name.

One uses these to align the fork (front or rear) dropouts, so they are exactly parallel and lined up straight. For the front fork this is important in cases where the steer is pulling towards one end by itself. Sometimes this can be misaligned dropouts, or a totally bent fork (this tool can't solve that). At the rear is also prevents a wobbly ride or the wheel scraping against the frame. One can use such a professional alignment tool, or just improvise one with some parts of threaded bar ends and some nuts one can buy relatively cheap at hardware stores. But I chose differently (totally irrational, why did I do this again?).

Campagnolo is an Italian (road) bicycle component brand with a very long history in road cycling, and people probably stick the label 'legendary' to this.

Many times I just looked at that Campagnolo stuff nodding my head and thinking: what a waste of money. It is good quality, but it's not made of gold. It also seems Campagnolo ended tool production more or less. I guess mostly because steel bikes are more and more something of the past, especially in the high end segment of road bikes. Thus it makes less sense to have all kinds of metalworking items like reamers and thread cutters, because they cannot be used on Carbon fibre frames.

So yes, I just bought the H tools and when receiving it they appeared in a quite sorry state. Oops.
Mostly the thread on the the cup end, where it screws into the T shaped handle. There was a lot of old grime and dirt and small metal fragments, covering up the fact that one of the threads was quite a bit damaged or worn due to some abuse. One tool didn't fully close by turning the cup on the handle. It felt like thread trouble...

A picture after cleaning the grime off with quite a bit of WD40.

On the left the thread looks still ok, on the right hand the clearly damaged thread on top, and somewhere a dent at the lower threads that made the tool not fully close anymore.

This wasn't clear from the photos or description with the ad.  It was only sold as 'used' and not as 'abused'. So I complained with the seller, and eventually he did offer to take it back or offered another tool in addition as compensation. I decided against it to give restoration a chance, and just be aware not to use the greatest forces on that half of the tool.

The most important unknown or gamble me was the exact thread type, the diameter looked like normal M10 size. Italian bikes or components are notorious for their crazy mix of metric diameter and inch thread (Threads Per Inch, TPI). With a caliper and a thread cutter determined it probably was just normal metric thread, M10 1,5mm between threads. 






M10 also has some variant with fine thread at 1mm apart, sometimes referred to as MF10. The Germans also seem to have a DIN standard for bicycle thread, Fahrrad Gewinde (FG), but this is zöllig (an inch measurement) with both diameter and thread.

So Metric it is, and I can just use my Alpen thread cutters to clean up the thread. Alpen,  also European made by Alpen-Maykestag of Austria.

 I used some cutting paste I bought for some other project at home to jigsaw stainless steel. Alternatively one can just use normal cutting oil, which is much easier to find and a lot cheaper at the local Hornbach (DIY store). This cutting was done by hand, so is a lot less messy compared to drilling or cutting with power tools. I used the paste since i just had it, and it works nicely.

I also cleaned up the thread inside the handle. This was a bit more of a gamble since I couldn't properly observe the cutting progress, nor was I fully happy I had only a simple single cut tap. This model is more tapered at the front. Usually hand taps come in sets of 3 per size. A starter, a middle and a final one which will give a much better cut at the deepest end of the thread. Luckily this was good enough and didn't need to buy a new set of taps. (would be still a lot cheaper then the H tool)


Results

Tool closes correctly again, yay!

Hope to have salvaged a tool, that might come handy one day...