1999 October 23 (Saturday)
The restoration effort ground to a near halt the last month. I spent some time playing with the wheels, but not really making any progress. Also, it’s the one year anniversary since I started tearing things apart. I knew the restoration was going to go slow, but didn’t expect it to go quite this slow. Part of the lack of progress is my non-motorcycle life. Another part is my lack of experience. I’m doing everything pretty much sequentially where someone who knows what they are doing could have multiple things going on at the same time.
Next time, if there is a next time, it shouldn’t take as long.
Borrowed stand
Borrowed stand
Trying to true the wheel
Truing gauge
I swapped my home made stand for a borrowed truing stand (actually a wheel balancer) that was a bit more stable. The third picture shows the home made tool I used to get the wheel close to true before breaking out the dial indicator.
It’s round
Rim width varies
Once things were close I checked and adjusted radial and lateral run-out. I was told that once the rim is true the key was to keep it true as the spokes are tightened. This assumes the edges of the rim are parallel to each other. Not true on one of my rims. When runout on one side was within the .008 in spec the other side of the same wheel was out by over a millimeter.
Also, my check for out-of-round was being measured at the wrong place. I should be measuring where the tire bead sits.