Old Wheels In Need of a Home!

My intention has always been to sell the old wheels that my two new pairs will be replacing. Quite apart from it being a little difficult to justify, even to myself, the temptation to keep the old ones “just in case…”, Mrs P only agreed to let me fork out the necessary cash on the components for the new wheels on the strict proviso that the proceeds of the sale of the old wheels would subsequently be offset against this!

The wheels that my new utility XT/F519 wheelset is replacing are not a matching pair but look pretty much the same. Both consist of similar high quality components and have been well built by decent bike shops, both of whom I’m happy to recommend to anyone.

The front, a silver 32h Hope XC laced to a black Mavic X517 rim with silver DT Swiss Competition spokes, is in as good a condition as the day it was built by Bike Plus (part of the Geoff Butler group in South Croydon): a testament to the quality of the build and also, I fear, to my namby-pamby riding style!

The rear, a silver 32h Hope Mono laced to a black Mavic X517 rim with silver DT Swiss Competition spokes and built by Merlin Cycles, is visually very similar but does not have a disc mount, and one of the freehub bearings has developed a slight notch despite being much younger than the front hub. This is why I don’t like cartridge bearings. If this were a Shimano hub with cup-and-cone bearings it would take 15 minutes to strip, clean, grease & reassemble and would then run as good as new for no cost. Instead this one requires a new bearing costing £10 and an assault with a hammer. Despite the minor work required on the rear hub I reckon it’s possible to gross around £100 by selling the Inbred’s old wheels separately on Ebay: that’s more than the sum of the utility wheels’ components!

The wheels that will be replaced by the XT/Sun set, when I get around to building them, are a matching pair of black Shimano Deore M510 hubs laced to matching silver Mavic X221 rims using silver Alpina ACI double butted spokes and were also built by Merlin Cycles. They’ve hardly been used, mainly because Mrs P has spent most of the last two and a half years either pregnant or recovering from childbirth. The only excuse for replacing them is that they’re rim brake specific, but the new all-black wheels will also look better with her bike, which I guess is important too! Indications are that I’ll be able to get at least £50 gross for this pair.

I took advantage of a 10p listing day on Ebay to put up the Inbred’s old wheels and the surplus-to-requirements Hope XC rear hub at somewhat speculative prices with a Buy It Now option. I habitually do this with medium to high value components as it saves on listing fees and it’s surprising how many bites you end up getting. Lo and behold, the Hope hub goes quickly for a modest £6 net profit! This just goes to show that if you buy low, even without really knowing what you’ll do with a component, it’s always possible to get your money back if you subsequently decide to move it on and are prepared to hold out for a bit.

A couple of days later and the front Hope XC/X517 wheel has also gone, for £47 net of fees, giving me a current net position of £105 spent on the entire project with three wheels still to be sold. This is not including the cost of tools or any charge for the time I’ve spent sourcing components and painstakingly putting them all together, but then the object of the exercise was simply to build two pairs of high quality wheels, however long it took, so I think that this is a reasonable approach. Even when taking into account postage costs and Ebay’s exorbitant fees it seems likely that this whole exercise will be near enough a zero-sum transaction. It seems scarcely worth asking whether it’s been worth it up to now - of course it has - but Mrs P thinks so too and that’s what counts! ;-)