Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Finished some wheels...

So a few weeks ago I was at ECBA getting this and that done. I asked Les if he needed any wheels built. He went to the back room and pulled out a box that contained a set of black Mavic Open Pro rims, a front and rear set of Campy Centaur hubs and a box of DT 2.0 spokes/nipples. I had never worked with Campy hubs and Les warned me that the rear would have a noticeable difference in tension between drive side and nondrive side. Cool, no problem. Les then showed me what was written on the box. It said, "Dennis Herr wheels". Damn, I was going to be building the wheels for Dennis' new bike. I felt honored and let Les know that, and that I would do my best in building them. Well, I finished them tonight, there's nothing much to building wheels once you get the process down and when you build using quality components. This set of wheels went together smooth and I brought them up to tension slowly, making sure I relieved the spokes after each truing. Dennis is a big guy and needs a strong set of wheels.

For those that don't know Dennis, here's the short version. Dennis is a local cyclist, trail runner, ultra marathoner. Although some hip issues had him riding and not running much. Earlier this year, Dennis was making a left hand turn and a pickup decided that it could not wait to get around him and passed Dennis on the left as he was turning. Dennis was in ICU for a while and is still in the rehabilitation process. He is still not able to ride solo but can ride tandem. Les and Marshall ride a tandem with him. Once he is able to get back on his bike, he'll have a good set of wheels to roll on. I'm glad I was able to build his wheels.

1 Comments:

Blogger gwadzilla said...

I have never built wheels

guess it will happen at one point

right now I just need to clean my basement

hope your friend continues to recover...

11:04 PM  

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