The Wika tire pressure gauge is made in Atlanta and high accuracy:

https://files.ctctcdn.com/e1f2fe6a001...0606148fcc.jpg

Dave

I need a set, or a rear wheel, for my SS (the blue raleigh i've posted a bunch) that allows me to add and remove the freewheel without removing the lock nuts and bolts with the cone wrenches, etc. Does such a thing exist? Because the wheels I have now don't allow it while using the park took FR-6 remover...
is it my wheels or are all wheels with bolts & nuts (non QR skewer) like this?

Can you post a pic of the rear wheel and freewheel ? I have a FR-6 (4 prong) freewheel remover, and don’t any problem with it fitting over the axle hardware.

As you can see it nearly fits down - but it’s not far enough and it wobbles and if you try to use a wrench with it as is it loses grip since it isn’t seated fully.

Tighten the remover with the axle nut. That should hold it in place while you use a wrench on the remover. Once the freewheel breaks loose, you can remove the axle nut and unscrew the freewheel by hand with the remover.

Odds are you can stabilize it enough by using an axle nut on the outside.

However the problem is very simple --- the axle is too long. More specifically the built up spacer stack on the right is too high. Remove the outer locknut and the remover will sit flush against the freewheel.

BTW- the freewheel seems to be pretty far inboard. Is this a narrow hub to which you added spacers for a wide frame, or is something else going on?

It’s just an Origin 8 wheelset for singlespeed/track that I got about 3 years ago. Rear fork is 130mm, fit right in right out of the box. No spacers or anything on the wheel. I don’t have a cone wrench - lost all my tools in the flood and haven’t replaced them all yet so I was hoping to just be able to swap the freewheel.

Like I said, just screw on the axle nut to hold the remover in place. It should work ok.

I will try, thanks. But my initial question remains - are there wheels where this is a non-issue? I’m in the market anyway?

Yes, no and maybe.

It's a question of the freewheel position with respect to the face of the axle. As the locknut width increased, and the freewheel stayed inboard to maintain line, that step got bigger.

Odds are that the Park tool you're using was designed around BMX dropout width, and so didn't allow for the longer axles. At some point Park will likely deepen the remover and solve your problem (if they haven't done so already).

In the meantime, either live with it using a nut to hold the remover tight, or get used to taking the locknut off before removing the freewheel.

Did you say your dropouts are spaced at 130mm ? If so, you need a wider hub, so the axle locknut doesn’t extend as far past the freewheel.

^This is exactly the scenario.

I had a similar problem when I made the terrible mistake of putting an ACS freewheel that uses their non-4-prong tool on my Phil Wood hub. It was impossible to the get their tool to engage with the freewheel body (at all) because the large diameter of the PW axle endcaps interfered with the tool. Removing an endcap from PW hubs isn't difficult, but only one will break free at a time (you can't control which one will go) and getting the second one off without completely disassembling the entire hub is near impossible. That was a lesson learned.

This is just a good practice in general, IMO.

I didn't know any better so I measured from the outside of each dropout to get the 13cm. Looking back that seems obviously stupid and wrong because thats not where the locknuts hit the dropout.
SO
I just remeasured from the inside of each and it's about 12.3 or 12.4 cm. So I'm assuming I can go ahead and just get some wheels with 120mm spacing - which is what I'm betting the current wheels are anyway.

Also the spacing of my front fork is ~95mm - is that normal?

100 is the modern "standard" front spacing.

I live in a fairly hilly area (generally the rides are some downhill, followed by large uphills, then the same over and over-not much flat). Currently my fixed gearing is 45/17, which is about 70 gear inches. Been thinking about switching gears to lower gear inches, what is a good target? Would dropping to 60 gear inches be a significant enough change to notice a difference?

Dave

Yes, that is quite significant. Anything more than a 10% change is definitely noticeable.

10 gear inches is a biiiig jump. I'd try 65 before going that low.

Thanks for the feedback. Maybe I'll try bumping the rear cog up to a larger tooth count to get there. Looks like going to an 18t will be 66 gear inches with a 45t chainring.

Dave

Was wondering if it would be possible to have an 18t fixed gear cog on one side, and 17t freewheel on the other side? Not sure if it can work with this dropout? (it has a 17t fixed cog in the picture below):

Dave

Eyeballing it, it looks like you're going to need to add a 2 full links to that chain before you can run an 18T.
Yes, you should be fine with that drop out.

If you need to dial the length of the chain in, use a half link like this one:

Adding a tooth to the cog moves the axle only 1/8”, so only a half link is needed, since it will move the axle back 1/4”. Two full links as you suggest is waaaaaay too much.

You're absolutely right. My eyeballing was not good but honestly if I were in this scenario, I would've resulted to trial and error starting from the minimal requirement.

What are these machined holes around the spoke holes for? This is a brand new front wheel from Aventon that I flatted out on a 50 mile ride with and noticed that the rim strip is not covering these smaller holes. They are in about 3 places around the rim. They are almost set too wide on the rim for a rim strip to fully cover, without interfering with the bead set.