Category: Resources

spoking a cogged up hub, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.

My unbuilt White ENO hub with the evil 16t cog and the lockring is back on my table. I looked up how to remove a cog from a hub that isn’t built into a wheel, and found a good thread on possible fixes.

Suggestions include:

• “Build half the wheel using the side of the hub where the spoke holes aren’t blocked by the cog.” One guy ripped his Shimano hub in half this way. I think the White Industries hub shell has more torsional strength due to its fatness, but I may save it for a last resort.
• “String some spokes in the hub, using the cog-side spoke holes. If it’s high flange, it should work, be a man.” On this hub with a 16 tooth cog, this method requires bending the spokes almost into a circle as you thread it in, in order to pass the cog. Each spoke would have to be unbent before lacing the wheel. My one test spoke makes this seem like a crappy plan. I do have 11 free spokes and a couple rims, but I’m not excited to pursue this strategy.
• “Make a wooden jig to hold the hubshell in a vice.” I have no vice. 
  
• “Slit the cog with a Dremel cutoff wheel. Buy lots of wheels.” I have a Dremel I’d love to put to use, but I’m afraid. Plan C or D maybe.
• “Strap tool. Strap tools are bad ass.” This seems like a good plan. I may need to buy one anyway. Because it’s a tool. This is Plan B.
• “Go to the bike shop.” This worked for one guy. I love the Bike Peddler, and it’s three blocks from my house. Plan A.

Other things I’m looking at in my workroom (toolboxes stacked on the floor of the shed):

Brake cables… could these be used instead of spokes? Thread them through the holes, wrap them around the hub shell, and affix them to a rim somehow? Run the cable through the spoke holes, and affix them by the pinch bolts to dozens of brakes and derailleurs?

The Bontrager. Put the hub in the dropouts, wrap the chain rotafix-style around the cog, get some leverage on the hub with… another cog on the freewheel side of the hub, and rotafixed with a second chain? My mental picture of this working out has twice as many stuck cogs, and a wheelless hub permanently jammed into frame, tied on with two kinked chains…

Off to the bike shop! Maybe they’ll have a Phil cog-based lockring tool…

The other day I mentioned that I was having trouble getting the full range of gear engagement out of my Shimano 7 speed bar-end shifters. The helpful folk on the RBW List pointed me to a fix for it, right there in the archives. I had ignored the thread way back in September, since gears aren’t my bag, right?

Since I now have two bikes with bar-end shifters, constituting 50% of my entire stable and all of my geared bikes, it behooves me to pay attention sometimes.

The basic problem is that if you take the shifter apart and fiddle with it, or buy it in separate pieces, or install it multiple times, you can end up with a shifter that doesn’t have enough “throw” to carry the rear derailleur all the way up and down the cassette. This apparently happens because the wound-up ratcheting springy magical thing inside the shifter gets unwound. To fix it, you need to wind it back up.

In an ideal world, I’d be able to buy (or make!) a special tool to wind up the slack, and reset the shifter. In practice, you can simply use the shifter pod itself to wind the shifter back up.

• You need to slack up the cable (but not remove it, yay).
• Remove the shifter from the pod, leaving the pod in the bar-end.
• Line up the square “chunk” on the shifter with the matching indent of the pod, with the lever pointed straight out.
• Ratchet the lever straight down.
• Take the lever off the pod, line up the squares with the lever pointed straight back.
• Ratchet the lever straight down.
• Times 4, or until the lever no longer goes down.
• Take the lever off the pod, and line up the squares with the lever pointed straight down.

You are now ready to rock and roll. “Rock and roll” is biketinker for “adjust the limit screws on the derailleur so you don’t shift into the spokes.”

Every time you ratchet down, you’re taking slack out of the system. Or appeasing the tiny daemons that live in there.

Here I am, practicing my new videography skillzes.

I have a SON hub on my Quickbeam, driving an E6. I’ll get LED lights, but I have like 4 dynamo halogen lights, and 6 or 7 spare bulbs. My short term goal is to get more than one of them into use on more than one bike. I just built a very affordable Alfine dynamo hub, but realized the 19mm rim might not be the best match for the 53mm Big Apples on the gravel roadster. Probably wise, since today the rear SpeedDisc rim decided it was too small to keep the Big Apple seated. I don’t know if the bead broke, or what, but that tire will not go back on that rim… Anyway, I put the new wheel on the Ross, with an E6 I got from a friend. Works great, but I’ll probably have to trim the lens tabs to work right.

So… the new plan is to set up the gravel roadster with a bottle dynamo I got from another friend.

Except I have no idea how to work those things. Surprisingly little internet resources are devoted to the question of how to wire a bottle dynamo to an E6, and half of those use clever black bottle dynamos with two explicit wire mounts. This one has a little capped-off recess that probably takes one wire. I found a picture that looked like the ‘extra’ lead is grounded to the mounting bolt, so I decided to run with it.

I put a wheel with an inflated tire into a truing stand in order to test my dynamo, and started cutting off perfectly good spade connectors and stripping wires to get some bare leads. I connected the wires to various parts of the dynamo, and held the wheel against the tire. What seems to work is obvious in hindsight. One lead goes through the little plastic cap – through a hole, doubled back through another hole, and screwed into the bottom of the bottle, and the other lead goes to the connection bracket. Hold it all together and put the dynamo head against a spinning tire, and the light shines! Pretty magical.

I bought some shrink-tube and a little box of circular wire-ends, but didn’t install them. I went for a bike-ride instead. Two, actually.

I went to make this again for an Instructable, and realized there’s an easier way, if you have cloth handlebar tape. I wanted a smaller screwdriver, and chose this little wooden-handled gem I found on a bike ride. The tip was a little mangled, so I cleaned it up with a file. I didn’t take pictures of that part – I just did it.

Basically, you wrap the screwdriver with about 30mm of handlebar tape, depending on the thickness of the shaft, and slip the aluminum tube over it. Friction, rather than adhesive, keeps the tube situated.

Everything you need to make your nipple driver: screwdriver, bar tape, aluminum tube and scissors.

Snip the tape at an angle. It makes it easier to slide the tube over.

I snipped my first one square, and angled it later.

Slide the tube onto the wrapped shaft (is it just me, or is it getting warm in here?).

And there you go – ready to hold your spoke nipple steady as you insert it into a deep-section rim to mate up to a spoke.

You can easily remove the tube and tape and throw them in a drawer until you need them again. If you build wheels regularly, you might keep one permanently modified.