The build will have to wait until the cat is finished with the workspace.
This week I finally got around to rebuilding Gonzo's rear wheel. As per Jim's instructions, I read Roger Musson's wheelbuilding book and watched the accompanying video several times.
My first step was to set up a spot indoors, clamp the new work light to a bookshelf, gather everything I'd need, and put a towel down.
The first step also required feline approval, which is easy to obtain, because cats go into circles. No sooner than I had laid the rim down than Moxie came trotting over to do his job.
The next step is to lightly oil the spoke threads and rim holes. I used 4-cycle lawnmower oil and cotton swabs.
It should surprise exactly no one that I'm not going for boring old silver spoke nipples. Nuh uh. The hub is red, so I went online to find red spoke nipples. The package arrived with orange ones instead. They were cheap, and returning them would have cost 30% of what I'd paid for them, so when I visited Wheelfine back in May I bought some high-quality red spoke nipples from Michael.
Then my sister sent me purple ones for my birthday.
The drive side spokes would be red. The non-drive side would alternate between orange and purple. Putting the first spokes in was easy.
Then I broke the cardinal rule of losing my concentration. Somewhere along the way, while lacing the first set of non-drive spokes, I must have flipped the wheel over and laced the spokes backwards.
Of course, I didn't notice...
I followed the directions for three-cross spokes on the drive side, and then flipped the wheel over to do the non-drive side. That's when my earlier error made itself apparent. I wasn't sure which direction to cross the non-drive side spokes anyway so so I straight-laced them, knowing I was going to have to start over. I knew something was off, so I emailed Jim, and went upstairs to bed.
What a mess.
I woke to an email that I'd botched the second step. How Jim could tell from the pictures I sent I'll never know, but he was right.
Take two.
The purple spoke nipples turned out to be crap; some had fallen off right away, one or two overnight, and others had been a challenge to screw on in the first place. So, I unthreaded the purple ones and taped them together (second set, non-drive side), undid the drive-side crossed set (red), and taped them together.
Then I re-routed the non-drive spokes that had been misaligned (orange)...
...re-laced the drive-side three-cross (red)...
...and laced the non-drive side, three-cross (orange).
Now we're getting somewhere!
The loaner truing stand not yet in my possession, I turned Gonzo upside-down so that I could drop the wheel in and check the alignment before driving the spoke nipples all the way in.
The hub rested neatly across the dropouts. It wasn't going in; it was far too big for that.
"Houston," I emailed Jim, "we have a problem." I was either going to have to stretch the frame or find a new hub to start over with. I went upstairs to bed.
I woke the next morning to a request to measure the hub. It should be 130 mm, Jim instructed me, because that's the standard road hub size.
I measured three times, attempting to take pictures simultaneously. Each time I measured the hub, it came out to 145 mm. I wrote to the hub supplier and to Jim, and went off to the lab. When I had a few minutes of downtime, I called the supplier, who had seen my email and was as perplexed as I was. He asked for pictures and sent me one of how to take a proper hub measurement.
One is not supposed to measure the hub end-to-end:
One leaves off the parts on the end that are destined to fit into the dropouts.
Which mine weren't doing.
I called Michael at Wheelfine and described my problem. The next day I took a long lunch break to drive my problem to the bike shop.
Michael looked at the wheel first and cast aspersions on the orange nipples. "They're crap," he said. I told him I'd buy replacements from him. "I don't have that color," he said. "I do have blue."
"Perfect."
Much to my relief, Michael agreed that the hub didn't fit. But it wasn't the hub that was the problem. With a ruler far more accurate than any I have at home, he measured the distance between the dropouts to be 128 mm. So, while my previous hub did fit (it was never easy to put the wheel in), this one would not unless we did some bicycle frame chiropractic.
First, though, we needed to remove the paint that was inside the dropouts. I held the frame steady on the work stand while Michael scraped at it with a blade and sandpaper. This wasn't enough to make the hub fit.
It was time to bend the frame, or, as Michael insisted I call it, to "cold-work" the chainstay. To determine which side we would stretch -- er, work, he did the string test.
He tied one end of a ball of twine to the left dropout, passed it around the head tube, and fed it back to the right dropout. Then he measured the distance from the string to the seat tube on each side. The numbers differed by a few millimeters. We would pull the side that was closer in.
"How strong are you?" he asked.
"Pretty strong for a girl."
He was fastening two rods, one into each dropout.
"Good. I want you to push the frame towards me."
We shielded the frame with plastic and cloth, and maneuvered it to rest against the work stand. Michael moved the rod one way while I pushed the frame in the opposite direction. Nothing much happened.
"I'm going to bring something out that would be great in a bar fight," he said.
The tool looked like something out of Star Trek. "You'll need to speak Klingon," I said. He laughed. "That's a batleth."
"We need to get the frame to move about an inch to get a few millimeters," he said. "Memory," he said, pointing to the frame. Move an inch it did. He stopped measured the gap between the rods, re-positioned them, and we pushed again. And again.
"I think I heard something," I said.
"Probably my shoulder."
Ta-da!
I left the shop an hour and a half after I'd entered, carrying the frame, the wheel, a bag of cobalt blue spokes, a high-end spoke wrench, instructions to tension the drive side spokes first, and a promise that Michael would check my work. "There's nothing you could do that can't be fixed," he assured me.
Back in the lab, I reported in to Jim. "The paint, and one good bang, would explain the 2mm difference," he wrote. I replied, "Lord only knows what Gonzo went through before I got hold of him. From the looks of the paint [when I got the frame on eBay], there was more than one bang."
Before I went to bed, I swapped spoke nipples. I'm getting handy with the nipple driver. It took less than 20 minutes to make the change.
While I was out at a meeting this morning, Sean stopped by with a truing stand and a dishing tool. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment