Wheeler Dealing

It was one of those elaborately simple transactions.

I gave a cycling friend an old cyclo-cross wheel of mine that had been getting in the way in the spare room for a few years because it didn’t fit anything I had any more, doesn’t fit much really; a 135mm width non-disc mountainbike hub on a 700C rim. No good for a normal road or ‘cross bike, and just as useless for a mountainbike, unless you had a spare rim-braked 29er somewhere maybe, good for clutter though and a pain to get built in the first place for the ‘cross bike that was awkwardly spaced out back. I could have rebuilt it with a road hub so it actually might be useable in any number of bikes in the house, but never quite got round to it. The wheel was in good nick, the hub had lived a good life and was hovering in that frequently re-greased area between ‘old’ and ‘classic’ but the rim was good as new, thanks to a well timed rebuild just before the host bike died. Finally fulfilling its “Come In Handy One Day” dreams it was exactly the right size for a correspondingly awkwardly designed singlespeed CX bike frame my friend had just bought.

In return and rather than have to discuss anything as vulgar as money he gave me a wheel that had been getting in the way in his shed for a while, something track frame spaced and fixed with a nice Phil Wood hub in the middle.

Of course this wheel doesn’t fit anything I have at the moment, best cobble something together round it then, I’ve built bikes from less.