What Have You Fettled Today?

[Gillstay]

Completely failed to straighten out a wheel: I managed to replace the spokes and get the vertical dings out of it, then I messed up the horizontal straightening to it looks like wet noodle again.

I'll try again next week.

Yep always best to walk away for a bit. let your head work on it for a while.

 

[ColinJ]

I put new tyres on because the old ones had cracks in the rubber, so it now runs on Marathon Greenguard tyres.

I have those on the new wheels that I just bought from @sevenfourate. (More on that below**.) The bigger tyres should be more comfortable than the originals.

Completely failed to straighten out a wheel: I managed to replace the spokes and get the vertical dings out of it, then I messed up the horizontal straightening to it looks like wet noodle again.

I'll try again next week.

I never got the hang of wheel-straightening! Bearings, tubes, tyres - fine, but once I start messing about with spokes I make matters worse!

When I got back, I removed the mirror and improvised a rubber shim from a length of scrap inner tube...

Well, that turned out to be an improvement, but not a cure! The mirror stayed in position a lot longer than before but did eventually slip round from the vibrations caused by riding my rough local roads. I sorted the problem out properly after finding a plastic shim of the right size in my junk box. I had intended to make a metal shim from an old tin can, but this shim is perfect.

**I put the new front wheel on my CAADX. The Greenguard tyres are 40mm wide vs 35 mm for the old Marathons and that resulted in the tyre scraping the mudguard. The guard can take a tyre of this size but I had to adjust the stays to accommodate it.

I then turned my attention to the rear wheel. There was a problem getting it in. It took me a few seconds to realise that the problem was that it had a 160 mm disk, vs the 140 mm one that it was replacing. I could have sorted the brake out to take a 160, but that would have meant getting hold of a 10 mm spacer for the calliper. I opted for the quicker fix, which was to swap in the 140 from the old wheel. After that, the wheel went in properly.

I now have the same issue with the rear mudguard as with the front. It needs to be adjusted to give the bigger tyre more room. I have stopped for a coffee break and will get back to that shortly. If I have problems with that I will update this post, otherwise assume that all is well.

I will do a test ride on the CAADX over the next few days and post about that in the 'Your Ride Today' thread.