water water everywhere but not a drop to drink
When I disassemble a bicycle wheel, I don’t generally just cut the spokes out and discard the scraps, but instead unthread them and lay them aside for later reuse. This has been moderately successful in the past (I’ve got 3-4 wheels laced with reused spokes, including the wheels on both of my allegedly rando bikes) but today I wanted to lace up a dynohub for my newly discified sweet fixie and discovered that out of these hundreds of spokes I’ve got several wheels worth of >274mm spokes, several wheels worth of <270mm spokes, but nothing in the 271-273 range, which happens to be the spoke length I need to lace a Shimano 3-series dynohub to a disc rim.
Bother. It’s not that it’s that expensive to buy new spokes ($12.80 + shipping for 32 14/15/14ga spokes from Danscomp) but it’s annoying to have to live with a bottom bracket generator for the additional week it will take to have them shipped out here from the decadent midwest :-(