backin' up the backups

 Folks in my bike club, and especially some in the Facebook Bicycle New Jersey forum, write me off as a hopeless bike retrogrouch, based on my re-adoption of friction shifters (and no, they don't have to be on the downtube; mine are on the bar ends), my maintenance of my road caliper brakes, and my avoidance of carbon fiber. But one of the things that's happened to me more than once in the bicycle world is that I've found a product I like, only to have it discontinued by the manufacturer.

I recently had to look for new wheels for The Excellent Wife (TEW)'s bike. Her brakes are road caliper as well... and, while it was not impossible to find replacement wheels, there were far more disk brake wheels than caliper brake wheels on offer. 

Now, wheel rims are parts that can wear out. I've seen wheels where the braking surface has worn so thin that it has actually split. I put thousands of miles per year on my bike, and I don't want to have to replace it, so I want to have wheels available if the current ones wear out.

I had a couple of rims left over from a wheel-building binge I went on a few years ago (as a result of that binge, I have two extra rear wheels for this bike). I had originally built those extra rims as rear wheels, so they require more spokes than I usually use for front wheels. So, just to have extra wheels, I decided to build them up as front wheels, and got hubs and spokes. And to save a little weight, I decided to use radial spoke pattern rather than crossing the spokes, in hopes that the shorter spokes might make up the weight difference. (They don't.)

One in the stand, and one on the floor.

I like building wheels. I'm not fast, and the process takes some attention, and it's always a compromise: the wheel is never perfectly true; it's true within certain tolerances. Like much of life, you do the best you can, and then you let it go. I like taking the time it takes to get it as right as possible, and I even like having to undo something I did earlier, when something I thought was going to work, didn't.

I'm nearly 70 years old. With three sets of wheels for this bike, I suspect it will take me on my last ride, whenever that will be. With Benjamin Pantier, my story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world.