Wheel Building

 One of the more enjoyable jobs of the week - building some Norton wheels.

Refurbished hubs and rims returned from the powdercoaters, ready to be laced up into wheels. As usual with building wheels for pre-war Nortons, calculating correct spoke lengths was a challenge. No matter how many identical hub/rim combinations can be found on bikes hidden away in the corner of the workshop, you always end up 3/4 the way through a wheel build before realising one set of spokes are 5mm too short!

 

The first wheel, at the top, is a front conical hub on an Italian Borrani rim, being built up to fit on a short-stroke Manx. The wheel down below is a rear for a plunger Manx, built using an original steel rim, some of the stainless nuts and spacers and the EN16 wheel spindle produced a few weeks prior.