Buy Fixie

We have discussed buying a fixed gear wheelset and mentioned that there is another way to go about the process of making wheels for your fixed gear conversion. Now we are going to discuss the process of wheelbuilding. This is a very delicate process that requires a lot of time to get it to work right. The payoff is great knowing that you have built your wheel by hand. There are two ways you can go about your wheelbuilding process. You can go the cheap way and use your old rims, or you can buy new rims and have a completely fresh wheelset.

Rims
The first step of this process is to get new rims. You may be able to use your old rims if you would like. Since rims are typically not in very good condition on a very old road bike, i would recommend buying new ones. You want to buy just the rims and not the whole wheel set for this. The most important part of this is getting rims that have the same number of spoke holes as your hub has. There are often great deals on rims on ebay:

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Hub
On the hub, the big two things to look for are the width of the hub itself to fit onto your frame, and the number of spoke holes. The number of spoke holes have to match the number on the rim that you chose. Make sure you get a fixed gear hub, these are hubs that have dual directional threading.

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Spokes
This is an item that you are probably best off buying at a local bike shop. Bring in your rims and hub and they should be able to hook you up. Also get the brass nipples to hook the spokes to the rim when your in there.

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That concludes our post on wheelbuilding parts. On the next post we will show you how to go about building your wheel.

How a Fixed-Wheel Bike works
Fixed Wheel hubs have two threads on them. The larger of the two threads takes the track sprocket, the smaller reversed-thread uses a special lockring. The way this works is the lockring screws in backwards and if the sprocket tries to unscrew, the lockring tightens. This is important because to slow down on a fixed wheel bike, you push back on the pedals which would otherwise stop the bike from moving.

New Wheel or Old Wheel
For the lowest cost option to building a fixed gear bike, you can use your old rear wheel, and just replace the hub. The faster way to get your fixie rolling is to buy a new fixed-gear wheelset. The biggest advantage of a new wheelset is that you can run a lockring to hold the rear sprocket on.

Spacing
The spacing of a bike is the distance between the two rear fork ends. It is measured in millimeters and when buying fixed gear hubs it is important to know what the spacing of your bike is. The best way to measure the spacing of your wheels is to use a ruler to get the distance between the inside edge of the two locknuts.

Usually a road bike will have a spacing between 120 mm and 130, track bikes between 110 and 120 and mountain bikes are usually 135 mm. It is best to either measure it yourself or look at the bike's documentation.

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