Cool New Wheel!

Over the weekend I took Audrey's wheel apart. This is what the hub looked like at the start - pretty gross. The spokes snapped very easily so I was able to pull them all out of the wheel pretty easily.


As soon as they were all gone it was very easy to take the hub apart. These are all the parts. The balls sit in a rim just inside the hub and they are held in place by the bar and the shaped nuts. They are covered in grease which makes the bar able to turn around against the balls easily instead of rubbing off flat metal. I cleaned and rusted and treated the metal and it turn out like the next photo - pretty good improvement!



I took one of the old spokes to my local bike shop and was able to buy replacement ones. They come in 2 parts - they have a nipple (he he he) at the end that goes through the hub and they look like a screw at the top. Then there is a bit that looks like a long nut that goes in through the rim and connects onto the spoke. You can tighten it with a normal screwdriver and the idea is to keep the spoke from coming up though the screw cause it will puncture the tube.

I followed Sheldon Brown's instructions on how to respoke the wheel. It's a great article and really easy to follow. It's a lot easier than I thought. It's not completely true, as I obviously don't have a truing stand, but I got is as close as possible by looking at it spinning on the bike upsidedown. The spokes alternate at being on the right and left sides of the rim. If the rim is bending to the right, tighten a spoke on the left to pull it back. And hey presto - a shiny new wheel! When the rear wheel is ready I'll bring them both to the bike shop to be trued properly.

Operation "Wheel"

The next thing I have done with audrey is to take off her front wheel. In modern bikes, when you are taking a wheel off, you can loosen the brakes so the tyre can fit through. Not so with Audrey alas. The wheel came off the fork very easily, a nut on either side of the hub, but then it got stuck in the brakes.



The way rod brakes work is that they are pulled up to rub off the rim. So they are always narrower than the rim so that it can work. The only way to take the wheel off bikes like this is to take the brake blocks off completely. So I did, and now poor Audrey looks very unhappy altogether missing her mud guard, brake blocks and wheel.


This is what the outside of the tyre looks like. Most of the exterior has fallen off, and it has left a cool looking weaved twine pattern. Is this what modern tyres look like too?


It was impossible to pull off so what I did in the end was wedge a screwdriver underneath it and cut through it with a junior hacksaw. It smelled awful too. Gross. The tube inside was very brittle and i was able to tear it with just my hands. The tape between the rim and the tube was still in great condition. It says "Halford's for cycles and accessories". Apparently Halfords was set up in the late 1800s so this must have been among it's first products. I wonder did they make any other parts of the bike?



This is what the connection looks like from the top of the spoke into the rim. I hope these haven't changed much so I can get a tool to remove them.