Friday, August 6, 2010

Retrobution?

Sometimes things just works out by them self, to me it happens very seldom but this time multiple things just "clicked"!

In preparations for Ronde van Retaard in September I bought a cheap rear wheel at Biltema, the plan was to use the rim and spokes for a wheel together with the Surly hub that was left over after I geared my Pugsly.

The thing was just that the Surly hub was equipped with a free wheel that's basically stuck where it was (hard to make a straight chain line) and to make things worse the flanges were noticeably bigger so there was a big risk that I had to buy new spokes and the cheap option was going expensive...

Then it hit me that I still had the rear hub from the old wheel left, if it was a 36 hole hub I could perhaps use it, after some extensive search and rescue expedition I managed to find it in a cardboard box, hidden away in a dark corner and to my surprise it turned out to be a 36h, and the flanges was almost identical size as on the Biltema wheel!!!

Built the wheel last night and everything went well, the spoke lengths worked perfectly. Today I started to think what gearing ratio to use. When testing old gears I had laying around I realized that the newer gears has a different pattern for fitting the body, I knew it was going too well!

The old hubs has a screw-on gear that keeps the rest of the gears at place on the hub, that has threads for this purpose. Then I decided to screw on the "lock" gear on the hub just to see if it might work. I turned out to work perfectly and the chain line was spot on! Time to run and buy lottery ticket?! :)

This is how it turned out. Hard to make a cleaner looking single speed solution on a hub set up!
Straight enough for me!
And this is how it looks from the side:
Went out for a short ride to make sure it works like it should and it was perfect! I really like the sound from the old hub when free wheeling.

Did a ride around Hagge for starters. Kept good pace, had to, since I only got one gear! ;)

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