This Space for Rent

Trivial(?) project of the day

New dynowheel

I promised that I’d do something with the old damaged dynohub after I pulled the wheel last November, and I finally got around to doing something about it today. I knew that I’d need 292mm spokes to lace a replacement dynohub (which had been sitting around since, um, November) into the existing Mavic rim, so the first step (before mail-ordering a fistful of cheap spokes) was to unlace the old wheel so I could have a rim for the new spokes + dynohub.

So I sat down at 1pm and pulled the wheel apart. And then I wondered if any of the spokes on the Shimano 3d72 would actually work with the new hub. So I measured the left side spokes, and they were, happily, 292mm. But maybe the right side spokes would need to be replaced, given that this is a disk brake hub?

Nope, they were exactly the same length!

So I sat down in front of the computer, summoned the spirit of the oracle, then spent about half an hour lacing the new wheel up. And then I went to school to pick up the bears, and after coming home I spent another 30 minutes tightening, destressing, and truing the thing.

Now, I don’t have a nice spoke tensionometer, so I have to resort to tone-deafedly plucking spokes to guess at the tension, but the wheel makes mainly the same tone all the way around the spokes and, more importantly, it sounds an awful lot like the other dynamo front wheels when they’re plucked. So if I haven’t badly messed something up, it looks like I can actually put together a wheel in finite time that may actually be able to work on a bicycle.

I’ll have to try some really short loops with it first, though.