Ebikin' it 6: Wheels within Wheels

The time has come to talk about wheels. I said, way back in Ebikin' it 2, that my existing wheels were doing the job without complaint. Well, that's no longer true. I've had more than half the spokes on the drive side of my rear wheel fail, one or two at a time.

What does this mean? Well, I reached out to Jeff who built the bike, and he assures me he never got into building wheelsets, so I really have no idea how old these spokes are. If we assume the rims were built into this wheelset when they were new, these spokes go back to the early 1990s. And they're on mountain bike rims. It's not unreasonable that they are just fatiguing out, especially with the sudden increase in load (me) and rotational stress (the motor.) This was my thought process up to last week. Then, in the process of re-truing the wheel, I took all the tension off it and had a look at the shape the rim would prefer to be.

It was kind of like a potato chip. Not especially round, and in no way true. That, and the tension map I get when I measure the spokes when the thing IS true(ish) tell me that this rim is pretty much toast, alas.

My local bike shop assures me that 26 inch wheels, except for mountain bike downhillers, are pretty much extinct. This... isn't quite the case. As it happens, 26 inch wheels are also favored by the cargo bike and touring bike crowds, and they're fairly common in ebike circles as well. You just have to find them. Well, I have the Internet. The world is my shopping mall.

What I read is that standard wheels, if there are such things, assume a rider in the 150 pound range. My rims, being (in their day) hardcore mountain bike rims, apparently are good for somewhat more than that. The rims I ordered (from a bike shop in Germany, since Ryde's American rep doesn't answer his/her/it's email) are these: https://www.ryde.nl/andra-40. They were recommended on a touring bike forum, where in addition to the 150 pound rider, the bike can expect to support another 50 to 100 pounds of gear, plus a heavy, durable bike. These rims are rated at for a system weight (rider+bike+gear) of 180kg, or about 390lbs. That's more than sufficient. They're also designed with ebikes in mind. And as high class rims go, they're cheap at about 30 bucks each. Plus shipping. From Germany. Still cheaper than most of the rims I was looking at in the U.S.

For hubs, it should surprise no-one that I'm getting Sturmey-Archer drum-brake hubs. I've talked about them before. Here's the thing. Ever since I've been using them (which was when I was in my single digts) I've //hated// rim brakes. Always out of adjustment, lousy when wet, and if your wheel isn't exactly perfectly true, they drag, or you have to adjust them so loose they don't work very well.  I like disk brakes fine on cars, where they're protected from the elements by the car's wheel. On bikes, they're right out there in the open, where they get dirty and (worse) greasy, and stop working reliably.  I don't especially want to wash my bike every time I ride it. Doubly so for the brakes.

Sturmey-Archer drum brakes are internal. The weather doesn't get in. There are a lot of varying reviews on how well they stop, from one guy who bent his front fork in an emergency stop with his 90mm S-A front drum, to people who say they don't work well. I used drum brakes on my first car with reasonable success, and unlike 1968 VW brakes, the S-A ones are self-adjusting. I have a suspicion that either some people's brake handles don't work well with S-A drum brakes, or that S-A's included cables are a bit too compressable. I suppose I'll find out. I have a 90mm S-A front brake+hub and a 70mm rear brake+hub+cassette coming for my new wheelset.

Yep. I'm building new wheels. Meantime I'm keeping the old ones cobbled together (the front is no trouble at all) so I don't have to do wheel building my first time on an "emergency" basis. I'm starting to understand why people keep more than one bike around. I'm not sure I'm ready to build up a second ebike for myself though.

Okay, I'd //love// to build another ebike, now that I have the tools and (some of) the knowhow, but it remains to be seen whether anyone I know will ask me to. So far, no bueno.

I'll keep y'all posted on the wheel building. Should be fun. :P

-JRS