Fat bike build

There were a few ‘issues’ that came up during the build that may be of interest to others doing the same thing.

Building an offset wheel

Surly apparently include a rather useful little 35mm spacer to allow easier dishing checks when building an offset wheel.  I didn’t have access to one of these, so had to improvise a bit.

My dishing ‘tool’, taken from the WheelPro building guide. The digital micrometer is held against the cardboard and acts as the ‘contact point’ against the hub.
With the offset wheel build, on a frame with a 17.5mm rear offset to allow the chain to pass the large tyre to a normal cassette, the hub is 35mm to one side of the ‘normal’ symmetrical dish. Setting the micrometer at 35mm means that the pointer is one reference mark and the main body of the micrometer is the other.

Cabling the Rohloff hub

When purchased, the Rohloff comes with a pair of gear cables and appropriate housing.  To fit it all together, the cable housing needs to be set up for the bike then the cables themselves need to be cut 20cm longer than the housing – shorter or longer won’t work.  Unfortunately I forgot to put the cable adjusters on before attaching the cables to the mechanism that links onto the hub, and couldn’t then reinsert the ends as they’d be disrupted by crimping them….  This mean that I had to improvise a new pair of cables as even 0.5cm shorter doesn’t work.  The Rohloff cable ends/stoppers are narrower than standard Shimano ones (apparently similar to Campagnolo ones) and I had no access to non-Shimano gear cables, so I angle-ground down a pair of Shimano gear ends to allow me to fit them in and get it right the second time.  The Rohloff ones are much higher quality, so I will get some in and replace my temporary fix, but it may be useful for other Rohloff users to know it’s possible to fangle a solution from more readily available cables.

 

 

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