Drat

For several months, I've been hearing periodic ticking from the rear wheel of the Vanguard. I've put threadlocking compound in the rim joint, I've inspected the spokes numerous times to see if any were broken, I've checked the cassette and freehub mechanisms, and have never found the problem. The noise went away for a time, but recently has not only returned, but gotten worse.

I had some down time at the store today, so I got the bike in the stand and removed the rear wheel for more detailed inspection. The spokes are all nice and tight, none are broken, and the cassette is fine. In the course of cleaning it, however, I noted that there was an odd line of schmutz around the shell, parallel to the flanges. I cleaned it off, but there was still a line. Sure enough, I have a crack in the hub shell. It's all the way around the shell. My hub is being held together by the collective forces of all that spoke tension and the axle holding the flanged ends to each other.

There doesn't seem to be any danger of catastrophic failure--it's been like this for a year or more. Still, it's an opportunity for me to build a new wheel for the bike.

This is the second wheel built on that hub. I built it early in 2001, shortly before I bought my V-Rex. It remains the only wheel set I've built using all alloy spoke nipples--and purple ones, at that. The hub dates to some time in 1999, when I installed it to replace the Sovos hub original to the bike (the rim on the original wheel was about dead, due to an assortment of pothole mishaps).

More than ten years on a hub and nine years on a rim, with something like ten or twelve thousand accumulated miles, is good enough, I suppose. They are wear items, after all. I'm no small guy at 220#, and the Vanguard has a heavy rear weight bias. Since I built this wheel, and have not been gentle to this wheel, I'm okay with needing to replace it. I built it to ride it, not to hang it on a wall and look at it.


On other fronts, I've been surprised a few times of late by folks who tell me I look thinner. I've not been doing any active work on weight loss--indeed, I've lost maybe fifteen pounds (or ten, depending on what the scale says tomorrow morning) since this time last year.

I suppose I may be altering my body composition a little bit by riding instead of driving. Logging my miles has proven to be even more effective than this blog at helping me make sure I ride to work more often than driving (although the fact that the car is in Georgetown with my younger stepdaughter is also a factor over the last couple weeks).

That I am apparently building muscle mass while losing body fat is interesting. I'm not losing any inches off my waist, I don't think, but my kilts are fitting a bit more loosely around my hips...