A follow-up to my first hit on The Clairebarian’s new 24″ wheeled bike.
Everywhere I’ve worked in the bike industry I’ve had easy access to wrenches with epic levels of experience building wheels. And, they were always happy to build mine. I’m fairly decent at getting them straight, tight, and round but why lace-and-load your own hoops when the person next to you has built hundreds? Why indeed.
This year, as I’ve been turning wrenches part-time rather than working in the front-of-house space, I made it one of my goals to figure it out along with some pointers from my friend Nice Guy Geoff AKA G*off. The Clairebarian’s wheels will be the 4th and 5th I’ve built in 2021. Each one is a learning process and I don’t know how many you have to build before the process becomes second nature, but I’m working at it.
I had a bunch of help for these two as it’s our goal to have Claire doing as much of the work as possible on her new rig. She’s pressed in the headset, installed the handlebar, and bolted on some brake adapters thus far. Next will be some brake rotors onto these wheels and then hopefully a bottom bracket and crankset.
The hubs are a set of Sun Ringle SRC which are really nice without going Gucci. They use sealed cartridge bearings and are simple to service and overhaul. It’s a 3-pawl system with thirty points of engagement. The 12° engagement is similar to what she’s on now. I like that they’re very easy to swap from a 135mm/QR setup to 142mm/12, because finding a 135mm hub this year has been tough.
When it comes to lacing them up, the best part of the SRC hubs is that the flanges have been sized such that the front and rear hub use one spoke length all around. My original plan was to take some of the collection of straight gauge spokes I had at home and get them cut to length at one of the shops in Vancouver with a cutter; however, I lucked into being able to buy a box of butted DT Swiss spokes the right length.
The rims are a pair of Sun Duroc 30s with an internal width of 26mm and a welded seam. Hayes has invested a lot of effort into their JUNIT kids’ lineup – hook ’em young right? – as these rims are a lesser noticed example of that compared to their cockpits, brakes, and suspension forks. They’re 325-grams a pop, which is right in line with the Stan’s Crest 24″ MK4 and don’t have the 1.5mm offset.
Once I get them tensioned, Claire will be running them tubeless with the last set of folding 24″ Maxxis DHF tires I’ve seen anywhere. We’re starting to get excited! Plenty more growing to do yet, so not feeling any time pressure to get it done yet.