Calum had a bit of a crash and destroyed his front Arch rim. I re-laced the Pro2 hub with new DT Swiss Competition spokes and black brass nipples to an Arch rim.
I also serviced the rear hub with a new set of 5 bearings and a good clean of the freehub body.
Cameron hit something at speed and damaged an XR-200 rear rim.
I treat damages and rebuilds as a great way to learn about the original build of the wheel, especially when it’s one of my own. It’s a great chance to see what condition the spoke nipples are in – especially whether they have seized to the spokes. With alloy nipples this is one of the primary concerns yet it can be quite easily prevented with correct building.
For a rebuilt I start by taping the new rim next to the old one. Since the spokes are happy in their position on the hub they can be re-used and don’t need to be disturbed too much. Spokes are stretchy steel and it takes a lot to damage them. I won’t re-use spoke nipples, especially aluminium ones so these will be replaced.
I then loosen each spoke nipple. I do this in small amounts by going around the wheel a few times and loosening only one turn at a time while the wheel is at tension. This prevents the tension from one spoke being transferred to others if it was completely loosened.
The new spoke nipples are prepared by shooting grease into each one of them. The blue tray is something I made as a prototype 4 years ago but it works so well I’ve never had to modify it.
Once the spokes are loose I go around the wheel and move each spoke from the old rim to the new one. The old nipple is discarded and the spoke thread is wiped clean. The new nipple has grease inside the thread and I roll the head in grease before it goes into the rim so that it rotates easily inside the rim.
Once each spoke is moved to the new rim the tape can be cut. From here it’s business as usual to finish building the wheel.
Some pics of the damaged rim. Cameron isn’t sure what he hit – they were riding single-file at pace and it wasn’t pointed out. The tube was pinch-flatted and the tyre slightly damaged so it was a reasonable hit!
And a few pics of the finished rebuild:
Peter brought this wheel to me with a broken spoke but after a quick look it was clear that the wheel needed to be rebuilt. The build quality was very poor and had caused one of the spokes to break just below the spoke nipple. Peter is off to the Long Distance World Champs in a week’s time and didn’t want to take any risks.
I rebuilt the wheel with Sapim CX-Ray spokes and Zipp internal nipples. The original spokes were DT Swiss Aerolites and I’m not sure what the original nipples were but they were not designed for this rim.
The 240s hub is in great shape.
The wheel is now true and should last many race kms.
This XTR rear wheel had pulled a spoke head through the rim and required a replacement rim. This generation of Shimano wheel is notoriously hard to work on; the spokes cross over (driveside spokes enter the non-driveside of the rim), the mixed lacing pattern and hub-mounted nipples mean that these wheels don’t resemble a ‘normal’ wheel and react quite differently to adjustments.
At first I hated doing Shimano rebuilds but the more I do the better I get and the more I enjoy them. The basic wheelbuilding concepts are the same – spoke tension holds the wheel together and pulls the rim where you want it – but the best way to get the desired effect is quite different and I like the challenge.
The finished wheel has run-out of less than 0.10mm in both the lateral and vertical directions and has exceptionally equal spoke tension which means the wheel is true and will remain true.
Like the FH-M965 rear hub these wheels use a titanium freehub body and titanium rear axle. The replacement rim was remarkably light for a UST tubeless rim at 420 grams, the old rim was 433g.
Reynolds have used a variety of hubs for their wheels – at one point they were made by Hadley, then White Industries, then a cheap Chinese hub, and now a combination of DT Swiss and the no-name Chinese.
This particular hub was made by Hadley in the USA – I’m not 100% sure on the dates these hubs were used but they’re fairly rare and swapping from the Campagnolo body to Shimano was proving difficult for their owner.
It took a bit of time but after contacting me I managed to find a used freehub body at one of my suppliers in the USA and I had it shipped over with an order.
As is the case with a lot of hubs the Shimano and Campy versions are dished differently. Back-in-the-day there would have been a Shimano endcap for this hub to accomidate this different dish but no such luck with the used freehub body so I made a 2.5mm spacer on the lathe to sit between the endcap and bearing preload adjuster. You can see the thin silver ring in the photo of the non-driveside of the hub.
After re-dishing and truing the wheels it’s now on it’s way back to Masterton for some racing.
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.
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