Wheels

The wheels are almost the most important thing on a bike, if not a fixie. You can be ultra pro and build them yourself, or you can buy a wheelset. I decided to buy a wheelset from bike island. What makes a fixie a fixie is the hub on the rear axle.

Rear hubs that you've dealt with, unless you have a track bike or a fixie will be a freewheel type hub, that is, you can coast on it. If you get a wheelset you'll probably have better luck looking for a track hub wheelset. This means that when you put a cog on the hub, it won't coast. As long as the chain is pulling it, or the wheel turning, the hub will keep moving. Viol
à! It's a fixie!

Another option is to get a flip-flop hub. This will allow you to put a freewheel on the freewheel side of the hub, a cog and lock ring on the fixed side, and be able to flip the rear wheel, and convert between a single speed bike, and a fixie.

Finally the reason I ordered the wheels second was that there isn't a large variety of wheels that you can get sizewize. I measured the distance between my rear dropouts to be sure. If it's 120mm or a little more (125mm or so) you'll be fine with 120mm wheels, as the dropouts will squeeze in a little bit when you screw the wheel in.

If you get track wheels or other wheels where the rim is so narrow that it's drilled for presta valves, here's a quick bit about presta valves.

Being a guy who only rode bikes that his dad got for him, those all being single speeds and eventually when I was old enough, a bike with gears, I've only known shraeder valves, so prestas, though, I knew how they were different I had no idea how to actually use them.

To inflate a presta tube first unscrew the valve. Then clip your pump to the valve (I'm not sure if/how the screw type of pump works on presta valves, I ended up with the Park Tools Professional Floor Pump, which has a clip). Pump the tube up to the desired pressure (usually marked on the tire you're using, at least by a maximum psi). Then simply close the valve by screwing it closed. If you push down on the screw while the valve is open that's what lets the air out. That was my mistake.

Now I suggest that you put your wheels on your frame. This will let you get a feel for your bike finally and help you sight your chainline etc.. It's just really nice to put some shape to your bike.

Now the first thing I said after I tossed my wheels on was "wow, my bike is long!" I ended up mapping some dimensions out and found that my seat tube has an angle of about 73º-74º with repspect to the top tube, which ends up being on the high end. My consolation was that the wheels obviously fit in the frame so that was the natural design.

From this picture I sighted my hypothetical chainline. From what you see up by the bottom bracket you'll offset the bottom bracket by hopefully just the distance from the beginning of the crank to the chainring. The chainline should be straight from the chain. This is critical.

Of course that depends on the bottom bracket, crankset and hub on your rear wheel.

More later

Cleaning and Painting

You can by all means skip this part if you want, but since I had a couple days with my frame so I figured I might as well spend some quality time with it and clean it up. Since it was a used frame, there was some rust on it, which was to be expected, being used.

Cleaning your frame is a good idea because even if you don't care how it looks you should at least de-rust it, otherwise the rust will continue to mess up your frame. Not a fast process, but it also weakens the frame, you should get rid of it.

I used a #0 fine grade steel wool (I'm not sure if the #0 etc. is a standard of grading steel wool, but it should still be labeled as fine grade). In the case of my frame, the steel wool didn't scratch the finish on my frame and that gives you a lot of lee-way when trying to get rust off of little spots. When you use steel wool you don't need to use the whole pad of steel wool and just tear off a small piece so you can focus your work on some spots. Steel wool has a few limitations, it's hard to get into the corners and small spots (if you have fancy lugging like I do, or rust on things by the bottom bracket (place for a kick stand, like I do)). You can, but I really don't recommend using a steel bristled brush, which will definitely get the rust out, but I think will almost definitely scratch your finish.

If you're trying to keep your workplace clean, take note that steel wool when you use it kind of sheds tiny pieces of steel, making a bunch of gray dust, and might also irritate your hand, so if you have leather work gloves (not the kind that use cloth, like gardening gloves) you might want to use them.

No pictures for the steel wooling, it's kind of not that interesting to look at.

Regular cleaning I did the good old fashon way.

With a toothbrush.

Now once again, this part is totally unneccessary if you just want to ride something. Of course, I just wanted something to ride on, but I was bored, so I did this.

Put a towel down, take an old tooth brush, mix some water with dish soap and go to town on it. Make sure that you dry it off though so it doesn't rust. A lot of stuff that may have looked like rust might have just been dirt in hard to reach places, which is a good reason to do this. There's a good reason why you should keep your bike clean, but having ridden a mountain bike for most of my life I don't mind the dirt.

A great reason to do this, is if you're going to homepaint (spraypaint) the frame. If you spraypaint over dirt, the spraypaint can flake off because the dirt would flake off.

Now I decided to spraypaint a few small areas in the frame, the areas that through paint chips and bare metal from steel wooling the rust spots mainly so that they wouldn't rust. For this purpose I used Rustolium (huh, go figure).

If you want to paint your frame, and money isn't an issue, I'd recommend powdercoating the frame. Powdercoating is really hard to come off and looks great, but it can run a little expensive, I had a friend's frame and fork powdercoated and it was $140, plus some if you got a special color like sparkles or something. Plus they sandblast the stuff you have powdercoated so that they do a good job for you.

A cheaper option it wetcoating it, but I suggest spraypaint touchups or powdercoating. The pricing runs the gambit between the two from $5 (spraypaint) to $140+ for powdercoating.

THINGS NOT TO PAINT:
1) Parts you won't see (the tube of the fork that goes into the frame)
2) Anything with threads on it
3) The inside of the frame (seatpost etc.)

Dropouts are fine, and anything else that doesn't have threads, the paint will wear off whenever it does. If you get it powdercoated, don't expect you get a nice paintjob with the decals still on the bike. At least not if you want it to look good.

If you're spraypainting, then you're not too concerned with looks and can mask off the decals, or spraypaint over them. If you want a good spraypaint job then you can sand down the frame, which is something I don't know about too much.

Chuck: Actually, just a rough sand will help, it makes the old paint act like a primer.


I used trusty orange masking tape that I had laying around to try and set the bounds of where I'd be spraypainting over this huge gash showing the metal. Note also that I spraypainted it outside and not over the towel inside.

An important thing is to try and paint with the surface you're painting face up as much as possibile or you might get dripage. Even though this is spraypainting, it still can look uglier than it needs to be. Try and apply two coats.

Now this kind of approach is nice if you're doing it for a while, or only have a few specks of paint missing, but my frame was full of chips and I was getting a little bored of painting small spots. So I decided to mask off the decals and try and do some spot paint, kind of eye-balling it.

The only thing I could complain about was that the Rustolium White is a little shinier and whiter than the frame's white. Which since I was contemplating an actual patch looking paint job. As you can see I masked off all the chrome, the decals, and stuffed the seatpost, fork tube and bottom bracket with paper towels and tape in order to make sure I didn't get any paint stuck in there.

Next: Wheels