I decided to take the wheels off my “NotAGibson” track bike and fit them to Vegemite, hoping to ride it today. Nuh uh!

The front wheel was too tight in the forks so I filed down the dropouts a little and in it slipped.

The back wheel was a little trickier, having never actually removed a track rear wheel before.

– Loosen wheel nuts to give some chain slack

– Drop chain off sprockets

– Remove wheel from bike

– Panic because I have no tool to fit the lockring groove

– Find the lockring is ‘actually’ finger tight and remove it by hand (reverse thread spins opposite to normal)

– Use chainwhip to remove cog

I thought the Miche groupset included a lockring. It turned out to be a splined mounting ring for easy cog removal.

Before realising this, I panic, looking at a cog with no thread that would surely not fit onto the threaded hub. Then I found this site: Jeff Noakes “Potentially Useful Cycling Information” which explained that, what I thought was a lockring, actually goes onto the hub first and the splined cog sits on top of that. It was lucky that this setup didn’t need a chain whip because it didn’t fit the fatter Miche teeth anyway!

The whole lot is then held on with the normal lockring (note: removing skin from fingers is not actually necessary at this stage).

Now the real problem becomes apparent:

Being a road frame, with longer chainstays, the track chain included isn’t long enough!

The chances of finding a suitable chain right now are slim, but I’ll head to the shop and see what happens..