Resurfacing Cones
With the suggestion from fietsbob, and some info from Aaron Goss, I took a shot at resurfacing my Ofmega rear hub cones. I was having difficulty finding replacement cones (well I looked at one well stocked LBS), but since they were toast anyway, I took a shot at regrinding them.
Here's what I did:
I made a mandrel out of 1/2 inch aluminum round rod. Turned it down to 10mm diameter on the lathe, and threaded to 26 threads per inch. Instead of the mandrel, I could have used the axle, but I didn't want to take the chance of messing it up, and I didn't have a junk one to use.
Screwed the cone onto the mandrel and used the axle nut as a jam nut to keep the cone from slipping.
Put the mandrel into the drill press and while spinning the assembly used a Dremel with a cone shaped grinding stone to carefully and evenly grind out the pitting.
Used sanding paper of increasing grits to smooth grinding marks. Finished off by polishing with scotch brite hand pads.
This actually was very easy to do, and making the mandrel was the hardest part. From the time I got the cones into the drill press, it took maybe 1/2 hour.
We'll see how they last, not sure if I ground through all the case hardened metal and got to the softer stuff, but at least this gets me back on the bike while I source some new cones.
Attached pictures will give sense of what I did. Anyway, I hope this motivates some folks to give the process a try in a pinch. Cheers!