One Less Minivan

There is no gift as special as the gift of a skilled bicycle builder for a friend. That very friend, James, came by for our second wheel building session today. Our first was basically decimating the wheel that came with this Murray Monterey Ebay bike I bought in March. Don’t weep for the now cannibalized husk of a bike; its life’s mission was to provide me with this sexy Sach’s 2-Speed Automatic Hub. We also used last session to measure the length of the spokes I’d need to build the hub into my 27” wheel.

Today’s task at hand was the dirty work of actually spoking and truing the wheel. James was kind enough to scrub off the corrosion and hammer out the imperfections in the rim so that we could get right to work this afternoon. I learned how to spoke the rim to my internal hub in a four-cross pattern which I can only describe as dizzying but still less complex than I had imagined it would be.

Unfortunately, as we were tight on time, I didn’t photograph the process but after a few hours of work, a couple of missteps and a lot of 1/4 turn tweaks with a handy dandy Park tool, the wheel was nearly complete.

On Sunday we’ll need to dremel off the extra tips from a few oversized spokes, cold cut the rear fork a bit to ensure fit, reinstall the 18T cog wheel, put on the tube and tire and hit the streets for my first test ride since buying this single speed Schwinn.

Can’t wait to see Mariquita done.