So this is going to make me sound like a bit of a fool but here it goes.
The cassette on my Crosscheck was slowly dying and I had already made an appointment to get it fixed, order in new parts and etc, and it was just going to be a few weeks(the only bike shop around here that I really truest has a long waiting period). Then the whole rear wheel died on me. I took it in and two bike shops agreed that both cassette and free hub needed replacing and some other stuff and it was going to be expensive. And I was going to have to wait to get it fixed. So I think forget that, run home, pull the rear wheel off my track bike(which I don't use as my work bike because the front fork wont accept a brake, still waiting till I can afford a new fork) and just stick it on.
Now I know that a track hub is spaced at 120mm and my crosscheck is spaced at 132.5(with the idea being you can run road or mountain hubs, right?) but I figured what the hell lets see if it fits. I remember hearing somewhere that you can just bend steel frames. So I put the rear wheel on, the frame bent real easy to accept it and my chainline was perfect once I moved my chainring to the inside of the spider and I put a freewheel on the hub and everything was fine.
A few days later it occured to me that I wasn't really sure about whether or not bending it that much really was fine and went an looked around. From what I have gathered it seems like bending from 132 to 120 is a bit much. Oh well. I'm planning on getting some spacers to make it a bit less of an extreme bend, maybe spacing it up so it'll at least be 125 or so.
What I'm wondering is how much damage have I done to my frame? I've been riding it like this for two weeks, theres no cracks or anything so Im not too worried, everything seems solid, but should I be worried?
Anyone else do this to a crosscheck? Anyone had catastrophic results? If the result is that going back to a 135 spaced hub will be difficult or dangerous now that its been bent down so much I can live with it, but if it's now considered a complete death trap then that really sucks.
Will I be able to run my original 135 spaced hub again if I want to(once I get it repaired)? Will I be able to safely bend it back to a 130 hub size? How much damage have I done here. All opinions welcome, thanks. I did some searching and most things I found related to adding spacers or cold setting, which would have been usefull before I did this to my bike. Any advice for people who have already(stupidly) done this to a frame?