In Part One of our article on building a lightweight racing bike, we discussed the work done to lighten the front wheel.
We closed the article by discussing applying the same treatment to the rear wheel. But before removing the gear cluster, we spoke about grinding off excess teeth on the gear cluster. We did this before removing the cluster as it was safer to hold when applying the angle grinder.
We removed excessive teeth from the larger of the two gear cogs as it was easier to get the grinder in on the larger cogs.
Excessive teeth removed from the gear cluster.
As discussed with the front wheel, we need to remove the tyre and tube. Luckily the rear wheel of the bike also had a racing tyre on it.
It was a little new and slightly heavy, so we used the remainder of the angle grinder disk and ground all of the tread off of the tyre. This reduced a bit more weight.
Rear wheel before disassembly.
Applying the same method as we used on the front wheel, we removed the rubber liner as it is not really needed because the spokes are the correct length.
We then applied the same triple lacing spoke pattern to the rear wheel as the front wheel. We have three sets of four spokes. This we feel is the stronger of the triple lacing patterns.
Rear wheel after treatment. Notice the triple spoke pattern.
We then focused our attention on the bearing sets. We needed to remove the axle to get at the bearings and also remove the gear cluster. Behind the gear cluster is a large plate which is designed to stop the chain from coming off of the top gear cluster and jamming in between the spokes and the gear cluster.
As we are now using less spokes, we feel that this plate is not necessary, so we jettisoned that to save weight. We could have fitted a modern plastic plate, but it’s not really needed with the triple lacing pattern.
Too many ball bearings.
Focusing our attention on the bearing sets, we discovered once again that there are way too many ball bearings in each side. Care has to be taken here as the rear wheel holds a lot of weight.
We remove six bearings from each side. Whilst many people will argue that you can safely go down to only two bearings each side, the cycle tourist in us is telling us that if you take out too many bearings, you will not be able to fit racks and then panniers to fill up with styrofoam.
A little lighter with some removed.
The rear wheel also had nuts for holding the wheel on in lieu of quick release levers. We ground some metal off of the nuts before the angle grinder disk gave out and once again compared weight. The old fashioned nuts are a lot lighter than modern quick release levers.
Junk left over. A great weight saving. Ground off rubber not shown as it blew away.
How much more weight can you take off of the bike now? That’s in our next article where we focus on removing excess weight from the seat.
