No real secret to this bit of resto just a lot of patience (and time) and lots of sanding, wire wooling and autosol-ing!
Here's the rear wheel as it stands today (never think about the 'before' pics on these things but the front was similar, dirty, rusty, worn and oily.)
As you can see the wall of the rim looks pretty scabby
Story is I got these wheels on a pro-craft I picked up from a bike recycling shop and whilst they were in 'good' nick considering the age they were suffering from neglect in the shape of lots of dirt, oil and wear on the ex-gold rims. Decided I was gonna do a full strip down and dismantle, clean everything and re-assemble but on the way to doing that I decided I might make a couple of changes:
1. Take all the gold remains off the rims and sand/polish them until they shone
2. Re-use every bit (nothing new even spokes or nips) - I wanted to keep a bit of the survivor cool plus i wanted to see how good I could get the old spokes looking.
So...dismantle everything and sand the rims with low-high grades of paper (by hand) then onto steel wool and finally autosol and soft cloths. Spokes and nips were each wire wooled and hand polished. Hub was just cleaned and polished using autosol. All washers, nuts n cones wire wooled.
As I said not rocket science but pretty time consuming but as the Mrs puts it...'it keeps you happy and what else would you be doing'
Once everything was cleaned up and ready to be put back together all the bits looked much better but I couldn't help noticing that the hubs had marks where the spokes had lay and rubbed over the years so the plan was now to re-lace the wheel in exactly the way it was originally so these couldn't be seen. This nearly had me tearing my hair out last night cos I've only done a couple of wheels before and using Stidds' guide I found it no bad with all new bits but there was just something not right about the way the spokes fell when I started to build this wheel using that guide. Cue a trip to the garage to check the other wheel and hey presto it's laced almost the exact opposite from the guide with the first trailing spokes coming into the hub from the other side. That'll be why the spokes were kinda bent when I took em apart! Anyway I wouldn't recommend this way as it was much tougher to put the final spokes in and not scratch the rim or bend the spokes to buggery but I got there. Then just a matter of re-assembling the axles, greasing blah blah
Anyway...long story not so short but wheel 1 is complete and I'm pretty chuffed with the results....now onto the back one! See you in a few weeks
I present to you my home made Weinmann Shiney made entirely of orignal bits and all by my own hand...yes I am sad and clearly very bored/too much time on my hands!
Ahh man I hate it when that happens...crap weather today and the after pics don't really do it justice...ho hum hope you get the idea
