want to make a ss out of my early 70s le tour. Currently a 5 speed after buying a cheap $60 new AL wheelset and put a new 5 speed cog on before I decided to go ss. If I put a ss freewheel on this and mess around with spacers to line up the chain line can I forget about redishing the wheel? It seems to work out in my head... I am briefed in the crank from previous threads, but I couldnt really get a good one for the redishing question. Thanks, Lou

theyre 27in if it matters

Depends on what spacers you mean. If you mean a couple BB/freewheel spacers, you probably won't have to mess with dishing.

But if you mess around with axle spacers, those are definitely going to push your rim around (probably towards the drive-side). In that case, you will probably have to do some re-dishing. If you've done any wheel-truing before, it's not that hard, just loosen up the spokes on the drive side and tighten up the spokes on the non-drive side. If you run out of threading on the spokes, you might have to get new ones, or (depending on how much you need to move the rim over) you can just swap spokes from one side to the other.

i think you might be confused about what "adding spacers" means. if you have a shimano casette-style freehub wheel, you can "add spacers" to locate the freewheel anywhere you want on the freehub body in order to get the right chainline (i.e. the single freewheel and the spacers take up all the room where the casette used to be). it will look like this


^^ courtesy of sheldon brown

however, i don't think you have a casette hub. i think you have a freewheel hub. once you thread the freewheel on, there is no "adding spacers" you can do, except, as Aeroplane describe above, adding spacers to the axle itself, which would necessitate dishing.

Isn't that backward?

You can put spacers on a freewheel hub, on the inside of the thread-on freewheel. You can only put about 2 or 3 mm worth of spacers on, but it does help push the chainline out if that's what you need.

Usually, on a freewheel hub going from 5-speed to SS, you need to move the freewheel out. If you used axle spacers to do this, you took axle spacers off of the drive side, and put them on the non-drive side. That would push your rim over toward the drive-side. To get it back in the middle, loosen up the drive side spokes and tighten the non-drive side spokes.