Vintage Workshop
Services for Brough Superior motorcycles and their contemporaries

Re-manufactured Enfield Cush Drive rear hubs.

This is a very sturdy hub giving a quite smooth drive due to the rubber shock absorbers. It has been used by George Brough, Montgomery, Norton and most probably by Enfield (but I do not know a lot about Enfields) in the late vintage years and thirties. Usable or only restorable examples of these have become almost unobtainable nowadays...

So I have set out and made a set of casting patterns, taking the dimensions off my 680 Brough's rear hub.

These are the patterns for the 8" brake drum, the hub flange containing the cush drive itself and the drive sprocket.


On this side you can see the vanes for the cush drive rubbers on the sprocket and on the flange.
I had two sets of castings made in GGG40, which is a medium grade of SG iron having a tensile strength of 400 ... 550 N/mm^2 and still some resilience.

Unfortunately the castings do not look as smooth as the patterns did, but the foundry people told me this is normal...


This is a machined brake drum and sprocket.

After turning all the surfaces on a lathe, the teeth have been cut on a CNC mill.

By end of July, you might see a complete hub here...

Now, this is a complete set of finished hub parts. You can guess the total amount of machining time required, and they still need brazing up and final trueing.



Have I promised too much? It is July 31 and here it is...

This is the complete hub after brazing up the flanges, cleaning up the seams, fine cutting the bearing, sprocket and brake drum seats and drilling and reaming the brake drum bolt holes.


So far I have produced two hubs, one for my Montgomery and the other one for a good friend. (He needs an un-finned brake drum).

I am not sure if I want to produce a batch of these hubs, but if you need one, why not drop me a line on ? Maybe we can talk a swap...
(sorry, this is not a clickable 'mailto:' hyperlink. If you want to write me, please type my address in your mailer. )

The early Broughs (pre '29) use a flat sprocket instead of the dished one.

I am now making a pattern for this type of sprocket as well.

7/2006: In connection with my Brough Superior SS100 project I have started another batch of rear hubs, this time making the complete article including brake plate and all. If  you are curious, please have a look.

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For any kind of feedback my e-mail address is

(sorry, this is not a clickable 'mailto:' hyperlink. If you want to write me, please type my address in your mailer. )