I recently ordered a replacement fork for my road bike off ebay for a nice $15. It just came today and to my surprise the wheel doesn't quite fit. The tire rubs between the legs of the fork. Just rubs enough to make it hard to turn the wheel. I thought hm, maybe the person selling it was confused and sold it as 700c when it was in reality for 650 wheel. I took it out and put it in the frame and put the caliper in, and the caliper sits only a few mm lower on the rim than with my old fork. This makes me think that it is in fact a 700c fork with only a manufacturing difference to account for the few mm's of size.

Current wheel is a Mavic MA2 700c rim with a Maxxis Xepher Un Catergorie 700 x 25c tire. Tire is not too wide, just too tall (comes out too far away from the rim).

I can make it work out if I pull the axle a few mm's out of the dropout. Seems very unappealing to me to have the axle not sitting all the way inside the dropout. In a workable configuration the axle does not even start to protrude from the dropout, so it's still entirely "inside" the dropout. Is there some sort of spacer I can put on the axle (shimano qr skewer) so I don't have to rely on clamping the skewer ultra tight? I'd hate to be going down the road and hit a bump and have the axle slide fully into the dropout causing the tire to rub on the fork, and likely me to go flying over the bars.

Wow, that was way longer than it needed to be...