When José and I compared weekend plans, it turned out he’d be available today, and he’d prefer helping with the Hornsby build over having a ride together. (Hence my choice to ride yesterday.) The next step is to build up the wheels with 650B rims, and so that was the goal for today.

Following the tear-down of the wheels that I’d built in September 2019, I wanted to clean the hubs and grease and adjust the bearings before rebuilding the wheels with new spokes and rims. (It was my failure to service the hubs on Ol’ Paint that precipitated a chain of events: José bought a new bicycle and I decided to rebuild Ol’ Paint as Dionysus.) When José let me know he’d be going to the gym today before coming, I set about with the hub bearing service on my own.

I’d already backed off the lockrings with cone wrenches from ParkTool, so I had an easy time removing those and then the cones. I used a magnetic probe to gather the ball bearings and set those in a dish for cleaning, then used a pick to remove the seal. With all the parts in a dish, I sprayed brake cleaner liberally to remove all the old grease and grime. I used paper towels to remove the old grease from the bare cups on the hub, then added fresh grease before carefully replacing each bearing in turn with fine tweezers.

The rear hub went back together with no fuss, although I spent a few minutes in adjusting the tightness of the cones while I confused the freehub engagement with bearing play. At last I learned to disregard the freehub and dial in the cone adjustment so there was no spindle play.

On the front, I originally counted 12 bearings on one side, smaller than on the rear, and nine on the other. I scratched my head for a moment as I knew that odd numbers are the rule for bearings. Then I found one loose ball still in the hub and added that to the mix: right, 11 on each side it is. The front cleaned up easily and went together faster than the rear, with no misdirection from a freehub coming into the mix.

Let’s build a wheel!

José arrived about half an hour after I’d finished redoing the wheel bearings, and after the usual chit-chat we got busy building the front wheel.

I’d reviewed Ali Clarkson’s video on wheel building before José arrived, and we quickly played the section on finding the key spoke to get started.

The building went mostly smoothly until we got to the point of needing to use a spare spoke to start the nipple. After a few false starts (including losing a nipple inside the rim — quickly retrieved), we realized we were screwing the nipple too far onto the helper spoke, not leaving any threads to engage with the spoke we were installing.

Once we had all the spokes in place we worked on gradually tightening them, checking our progress with the tension gauge, before finally getting serious about truing the rim. It took a couple of full goes around to get the rim centered between the hub ends, and then it took only a few more turns to get it straight and true. With Nana calling us to dinner, we got the rim tape on as the finishing touch for the day.

One last fight

After dinner, with the guests seen off and the dishes done, I couldn’t resist the urge to get the tire on. I wasn’t prepared for the fight it gave me, though. The fit was so tight I had to use tire levers and quite a bit of force. The process left a good deal of latex residue from the tire bead on the rim, which I cleaned up with a damp paper towel.

After all that fighting, the valve gave me another challenge. Although it’s a good 40mm stem, it doesn’t protrude very much from the rim and my floor pump can’t get a good grip on it. I ended up using the ParkTool hand pump. I got the tire up to pressure quickly then, but it’s still not seated quite right on the rim — it’s too tight. I’ll try again when we do the final assembly, and if it’s still sitting too tight I guess I’ll hope that the first few hundred kilometers of riding will soften the tire up a bit.

In my haste to get the tire on, I’d neglected to weigh the bare wheel. The wheel and tire together come to 1,565g, which is a nice savings from the 1,692 of the old wheel with the Billy Bonkers tire. With 196g for the inner tube and 464g for the Panaracer Fairweather tire, the bare wheel works out to 905g. The original wheel was 881g, so the weight savings is entirely in the slimmer tire.