It took a snow day to get the thing done. It had been sitting as a well cleaned, prepped, framesavered frame and fork with headset and cranks installed for about 3 weeks (possibly longer). I busted out the wheels last night, and with the assist of a couple few hours and a fair number of Anchor Steam Christmas Ales, I got it out the door and for a late night really really cold test ride.
Riding conditions ranged from snow packed roads to 4-8 inches of fresh snow in the park to rutty bits to a couple ill advised trail shortcuts that did not end badly. It was about 5F out and my face hurt. I mostly resisted the urge to ride through all my local cyclist pals snow covered yards leaving fatbike tracks. This is going to be a really fun bike.
Note the squishy blue ritchey grips which have been sitting in the box for over a decade waiting for the right bike. They are made out of smurfs. As cool as the flat bars look, I need some much wider riser bars on it. Maybe just swept back a bit.
These were some fun wheels to build.
They were a good challenge. I really like building wheels. I am also pretty darn slow, but the second wheel was a breeze compared to the first. The tricky bits was getting them dished right, the first one laced up way off in dish and truousity. the second one laced up almost dead on. Not sure why, other than I was better after building one. If you are building your own fat bike wheels I highly recommend reading the
surly pugsley instructions a bunch and then figure out your spoke lengths with this handy visual calculator at
freespoke double check the rim and hub dimensions,
vic has a nice post that discovered some error in the large marge calcs. I found the ERD on the rolling Darryl rim is a bit different than surly's spec, but it is easy to play with the numbers and change them. I also HIGHLY recommend not using an ERD that is 15mm to big when you order your spokes. Good thing I have the Tarik's Everful Box o' Spokes at my disposal. No matter how many times you double check your calcs, if you transpose some numbers consistently you will still be wrong.
I had to press out the bushing out of a old canti brake and pair that with a beheaded M8 bolt to get the surly wheel build tool to work with the Paul hub. If I had my unimat set up, I should have just turned down the head of an M8 bolt. But one stupid project at a time. Don't worry if this does not make sense to you. It is not a common problem to have.
I can think of lots of things I would do differently. The most likely one is that I would probably have set up the disc brakes before I put the tires on. You can not get a line of sight on the caliper and pads with the tire on. Your head keeps hitting the tire. I set em up by smell. It feels good to be a gangsta.
Thanks to the
Mellow Velo Fellers for helping me put together the highly personalized build kit eons before I could actually get the fat bike built. I shall now commence the riding the hell out of it.
