noob here, am converting an old ten speed to single speed is it necessary to redish the wheel, any help appreciated, thanks.

Maybe. Depends how the chainline comes out. You can eyeball it, but it's really best to measure. For the front, measure from the middle of the seat tube to the chainring. For the rear measure from the inside dropout face to the cog. Knowing the spacing of the rear triangle you can figure out where the cog should be in relation to the chainring or vice versa. Within a couple millimeters is ok for single-speed use.

Does the bike have a 5-speed freewheel and are you going to just remove 4 of the cogs and replace them with spacers or are you going to refit a real single speed freewheel? If the former, choose a suitable position for the cog to give a good chainline and you should be good with no other changes.

The dish defines how the rim is centered between the lock nuts. If you don't move the axle in the hub, you should not change the dish (assuming your wheel is properly dished now). If your chainline is bad enough that you need to change the axle position, then you'll need a re-dish too.

As the others said; depends on how you do it. If your starting with a freehub with a cassette, then no, as HillRider said remove the lock ring, use spacers and cog and your golden. If however you are starting with a freewheel and want to use a single cog, this will take a bit of knowhow to work; it's doable but the complexity will depend on the freewheel. If you want to remove the multi speed freewheel and screw on a BMX freewheel, then yes, you will need to respace the hub on the axle and re-dish the wheel.

thanks for all the input guys, the bike is an old schwinn with five speed freewheel, not really worth spending a whole lot of extra cash to have it redished, maybe I'll just ghetto singlespeed it for now.

If you're the adventurist type, you can try making a one cog freewheel from a multi-cog freewheel. https://forums.mtbr.com/singlespeed/h...de-373319.html

assuming a good chainline, if i can get the SS rear wheel in the dropouts and the rim is centered between the stays, i will not redish, otherwise, i will.

You can buy ss conversion kits for modern free hubs. The kit includes a cog, and two spacers. No reason you couldn't do a DIY version, think about using PVC for the spaces to get your chain line where you need it to be.

I've run a bike rigged temporarily as a single speed before. Simply putting the chain on one of the middle sprockets gave a good gear ratio and an acceptable chain line. If this works out for you, then there's no compelling reason to replace the freewheel or even remove the extra sprockets. However, to get the best aesthetics and a marginally stronger wheel, you should replace the freewheel with a BMX one, adjust the axle spacers to centralise the hub and redish the wheel.

Question for you: Is the shifting so out-of-whack you can't tune it and actually just ride it with shifting?

I own a SS/Fixie and commute on it, but it's got a near zero dish rear flip-flop hub designed for the purpose. I guess I don't understand why someone would take a bike that has shifting on it already, and components for multiple cogset in the rear and disable it, unless the rear derailleur is so bad or the shifters so non-functional, I have to disable it. I guess I'm not really understanding the point of going ghetto SS with the setup.

When I got the bike everything was so rusted nothing would move, so I took all the shifting components off and decided I wanted to try converting it to single speed, the bike is pretty old but I thought it might be fun to try a ss conversion.