Dyna-Annie

Howdy,


I found a 21 inch front wheel with tire and tube on Ebay last week and was the winning bidder. ($159) There were twenty something bids and I was lucky enough to pick them up at the close.
UPS delivered it yesterday. The chrome rim and spokes are very good, as is the tire and tube. Tire is a Dunlop D401 with a lot of tread left.
These wheels are hard to find. Everything in 21 inch seems to be for a wideglide. A W-G hub is 2 inches wider than my Dyna hub. I think this wheel came off of a late model Sportster. I pulled the cast wheel off the Dyna, and using the same two spacers with the 21 inch the new wheel fit perfect.
I've always liked a laced wheel over a cast one. I guess the only thing I am giving up is that the cast is a tubeless. Anyway, I stuck it on the Dyna and took a few photos of it. The fender did not need changing, even though the 21 inch is about 1-1/2 inch bigger overall diameter. It just fit nice up into the fender.
I made a duplicate axle out of aluminum bar stock while I had the axle on the bench to measure. The Dyna axle has six different diameters on it's length. That was a surprise! Used the South Bend to cut the end threads of 1/2-20 as the final step.
I will next make a new true stand, using the dupe axle to bolt this up tight. The rim needs just a slight amount of truing to run where I want it.
This gave my just "opped" shoulder a good work out. Hurts like the dickens.
The axle was turned on centers in the lathe, so it is dead true. Not really necessary unless I was going to use it on the bike, but it keeps me in practice regarding tolerances anyway. - Ryder

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Of course, he is going to make sure there's sufficient clearance between the top of the tire and the bottom of the fender (even still, with enough clearance in case of a flat tire).
A couple riding two-up on their Springer Softtail had the front wheel lock up (because of a too-low-to-the wheel front fender), when they compressed the forks going down through a riverbed spillway, and it sent the machine end-over and landed on both of them. Flight-for-life had to air lift them out of the backcountry and over to the city hospital.
Their machine had been customized for them a week before the ride, and the OEM fender position was lowered.
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Didn't like the old (new) ebay wheel. Building a new wheel.

Finished my wheel today. Took me about two hours and it was done. The problem I was having was due to the fact that this wheel build used a 4 cross pattern. My old Sportster had a 2 cross pattern and that made it a lot simpler build.
Anyway I got things going in the correct order and it went right together. I used two dial indicators to true the wheel and they worked great. I could sit there and watch the needle move as I tightened or loosened the spoke wrench.
I used an additional method on this wheel build and it really makes things easy. That was grouping all 40 spokes into 10 groups of 4 spokes each.
You will see how I tagged them so that I could identify what group was which as I built. These 4 grouped spokes are right together and are composed of 2 on the right and 2 spokes on the left. These 10 groups of 4 are spread equally around the rim in ten different zones. All you need to do is adjust all 4 spokes in a zone and the rim never gets away from you. Very easy to maintain control of the entire wheel at all times.
The end result is total radial runout is .008 inch and the total lateral runout is .010 inch. That is close to perfect. I am very happy with the wheel. Tomorrow I will grind some spoke ends and then mount the tire. I'll send a pic of it on the Dyna. - Ryder