Wheelworks.co.nz, Handbuilt wheels by Tristan Thomas

I’ll be out of the workshop from December 24th until January 11th and I won’t have email contact during this time.

I’ll be heading through Gisbourne to Te Kaha where I stayed last year riding around the East Cape, then to the Coromandel for a few days of exploring at Hot Water Beach and back through Te Urewera National Park stopping off to see my parents for a few days in Napier.

I’ll be sun-tanned and ready to build wheels upon my return :-)

Have a great Christmas,

Tristan

The latest issue of New Zealand Mountain Biker magazine has a write-up of an interesting pair of wheels I built using Hope Pro2 hubs with custom polished centers, light weight DT Swiss Revolution spokes, and Stan’s ZTR Arch rims.

The rear wheel is dishless, meaning that the rim is centered between the two hub flanges.  On a normal hub this isn’t the case because the cassette body pushes the driveside flange in towards the centerline of the wheel.  The result of the wide, symmetrical flanges of the Hope Pro2 Singlespeed hub is a huge improvement in wheel stiffness compared to a normal ‘geared’ hub.  Normally the Pro2 can accept 6 cogs on it’s short freehub body, a nod to it’s heritage as a trials-specific hub and the old requirement for 26″ bikes to have 6 functional gears.  By mounting the freehub body in the lathe and removing some steel from the back of the freehub I fitted 7 cogs from an XT cassette giving a 13/32 ratio.

Why?  Personally I’ve run only 7 or 8 gears on my rear wheels for years – by moving the cassette outwards the chainline in the middle chainring is greatly improved for climbing in the middle ring and I find that I don’t miss the two smallest cogs unless I’m riding long distances on the road.  By squeezing these 7 cogs onto the Pro2 SS hub the wheel has the advantage of better chainline as well as a huge increase in lateral stiffness.

Both hubs had their centers polished to match the silver spokes and some custom Wheelworks decals applied.  The front wheel can be set up for 9mm quick release, QR15 or 20mm thru-axle forks.

This wheelset is designed for aggressive cross country / all-mountain / light freeride and weighed a total of 1705 grams (the magazine typo’d and said 1800) which is incredibly light for a wheelset of this stiffness and durability.  A lighter version for cross-country could be built using the lighter 355 or Crest rim.

The guys at the magazine really understood the purpose of the wheels and were impressed by them -

I wasn’t thinking ‘my current factory-built 28 spoke wheelset is flexing a bit and makes for a slightly vague ride’ until I tried this wheelset.  The difference in feeling is striking and I can see big benifits for big or aggressive riders.

The magazine is in all good bookstores now.

Well first graded road race was a good new experience. Race started at a nice sedate pace which I was pretty stoked with. If this is all I had to do as a roadie it was going to be an easy day. Regretfully about 10k in we took a turn and were struck by a strong crosswind so some of the heavies went to the front and drilled it. This left me in serious trouble just holding the wheel in front of me. Now from thinking I was in for a cruisey day I had begun to contemplate how painful it could be. Thankfully for me the pace settled down and I managed to sneakily loiter around at the back of the bunch and do as little as possible. I think most people were a bit intimidated by the hills to come.

For the next while quite a few little solo breaks tried to go up the road but these always seemed doomed to failure with the full bunch behind so I never gave them a second thought. In my attempt to make my proper road racing debut as successful as possible I had studied the course profile and noted that it was mainly flat until about halfway. Therefore at about halfway I stopped loitering and slowly made my way towards the front end of the bunch. On a small riser a small split started to form in the bunch, being towards the front and nice and attentive I quickly leaped across the gap to safety. This split came to nothing pretty quickly but at least it made me feel good about my attentiveness.

The race started in earnest when we finally hit a decent hill with Alex Revell animating the race. He lit it up on the first decent hill and left everyone including me scrambling up the road after him. I was in trouble but managed to slowly drift back through the mangled bunch and join back on the downhill. On the next hill that same tactic didn’t work for me again because there was no downhill. I tried my hardest to rejoin with a group of three but blew myself to pieces only to have a larger group of 5 or 6 steam past to rejoin leaving me out the back with one other guy. We managed to sit about 300m off the back of the bunch for about 10k to Kurau hill. Frustratingly close yet agonizingly far away. Kurau was a horrid hill, it went straight up with a strong headwind. I must have been reduced to a cadence of about 40 and zig zagging up part of the hill. I managed to drag myself agonizingly close to the tail end of the remnants of the bunch but on the slow downhill I probably lost all that distance again.

Finally I was confronted with the climb of Admirals road. Just put myself in the box and proceeded to climb past a mixture of B and C grade making most of them feel very ordinary to the point were one even commented I had wings as a danced up of the road. At this point I definitely didn’t feel like I had wings…. more like a couple of bricks in my pockets. I think I managed to pick off at least 10 people on the climb and finished in the big chainring and proceeded to feel rather toasted.

Nothing sounds as cool as King hubs – the 72 engagement points provide nearly instant engagement and that awesome ‘angry bee’ sound when you freewheel.

These hubs are laced with DT Swiss Competition double-butted spokes and alternating black and gold spoke nipples.

Rims are the excellent Stans ZTR Arch.

These wheels are ready for a hard life on a Turner RFX freeride bike :-)

This singlespeed rear wheel will be heading down for the Kiwi Brevet in February.

It’s a DT Swiss 240s single speed hub. Normally these hubs have 18 engagement points but DT Swiss recently released an upgrade kit to double the engagement points to 36.

The new ratchet rings are also 9 grams lighter than the 18 point version because of some amazing machining work.

The rim is a Stan’s ZTR arch – their 420 gram “all mountain” rim which is really well suited to applications like a single speed where lateral stiffness and durability are needed.

I used DT Swiss Revolution spokes to reduce weight – since the rim is so stiff we didn’t need to use stiffer spokes.

Total wheel weight was 820g before the 9g reduction from the ratchet rings.

Like all of the Stan’s wheels I build these are shipped with the yellow tape and two valves so they’re ready for use with inner tubes or with tubeless.

Derek’s carbon tubulars for IronMan.

Swapping the freehub body on an American Classic rear hub from Campagnolo to Shimano.  Removing the freehub body exposes the unique 6-pawl design of the hub and the clutch plate which engages the pawls.  Unlike all other brands of hub the pawls in an AM Classic are not actually responsible for the ratchet mechanism – a small steel spring rotates across the clutch plate which causes the ratcheting sound….when the hub is engaged the clutch plate brings the 6 pawls into contact with the freehub body.  Cleaning the hub is crucial to having it perform well.

The wheel needs to be re-dished between Shimano and Campagnolo freehubs.

I do a lot of repair and maintenance work on all brands of wheels for people all around the country – please contact me if you need speciality work done.