Wheels, suspension components

25 Dec 2012, 11.30am

Since the last blog I’ve done some work on the suspension and wheels.I did a bit of work on the foam cores for the bottom bracket mounts, then my Canondale Lefty front hubs finally turned up and I diverted to lacing up the front wheels. I’ve used a single cross pattern on the outside and two cross on the inside. The wheel centre is offset 7mm to the inside, a standard setup for Canondale hubs. The rims are 16” Velocity Triple V’s.

I had second thoughts when I fitted the discs to the Cannondale hubs. The Magura Big setup that I bought from Greenspeed was alarmingly massive and I had pictures of the front end shattering under panic braking, so decided I had to set them up on the back wheels. I cobbled a setup together, seems to work OK.

First off, I made a mount that screws onto the freewheel thread and is fixed with three 6mm grubscrews (the hub thread is going the wrong way to lock under braking).

The brake calliper frame looks like this -

Swiss Cheese inner mount and knuckle joint (similar to a bicycle handlebar mount) -

Swing arm Teflon bushes have been recycled from the Mk IV –

The steel frame is 5/8” chrome moly, recycled by chopping up the old Mk IV driveshaft. The knuckle joint is set up so that, in the event of a flat, the calliper mount is swung out of the way by loosening the axle nut and the knuckle joint and sliding the tube back, then swinging it up out of the way, passenger’s role changing to a jack. The wheel doesn’t need to be removed to attend to the tyre. Took a couple of hours work to shim the calliper up properly. Just needs a lick of paint. The calliper mount was deliberately set up with a small gap to the calliper, allowing me to shim it accurately. The weld pulled it out of shape quite a bit and it needed to be tapped back into place.

I also finished off the second lower wishbone by gluing the chassis mounts in place with epoxy reinforced with nanotubes. That’s plasticene used as a funnel and mould.

Here’s an upper wishbone ready for the rod end mount. Rod ends need to have brass linings, the one's I used on Mk IV had plastic linings and wore very quickly.

The jig to align the mount, made from a piece of scrap that’s been in my shed for 25 years -

The resin setting in the jig -

Trimming the wishbone with a router -

Trimming down the mount with a saw fitted with an aluminium cutting blade

The finished wishbone, just needs a coat of paint and maybe a couple of rivets for extra security

For those wondering how the Elderflower champagne went, here’s the result. Pity that, it tasted pretty good, sort of a cross between cider and ginger beer.

Merry Xmas.