My last two cyclocross races were notable for all the wrong reasons, namely a god awful creaking noise coming from my bike. When the issue first arose, I thought it must be pedal related since it only happened when I pedalled. A liberal application of grease in the pedal bodies and I assumed all would be well. The first race after this "fix" showed that my optimism was poorly placed, as the creak was still there, and had seemingly brought an entire choir of his or her creaking friends. I was at a bit of a loss and utterly annoyed, and so I put the bike away and just wanted to forget about the whole thing!
After a few days, I had a lightbulb moment; the noise only seemed to happen when I had my race wheels on the bike. I quick test ride around the park with my commuting wheels on the bike gave me no annoying creaking noises. Eureka! Turning my attention to the race wheels, I pulled the quick release skewer out to start disassembly. I didn't really have to do much else as once the skewer was removed, the hub and cassette fell off. The problem had revealed itself! As much as I'd love to claim that the axle broke due to an over abundance of power coming out of my legs, I think we can put this one down to a design flaw.
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| The problem identified. |
The entire wheelset had cost me about $300 a number of years ago, so any fix needed to be fairly economical. That said, I couldn't bear to see a fairly solid set of wheels go to waste due to something as trivial as a broken axle. Some work was done trying to source a reasonably priced replacement, though being an older, and possibly less popular wheelset, there didn't seem to be much available.
Some research showed that the hubs used in the Easton EA50 series wheels were similar in many respects to the more commonly available Novatec hubs. There were none that were exactly the same however, but they were similar enough to make me wonder if I could use one to repair my poor old Easton wheel. My suspicion is that Easton have taken two different hub designs from Novatec and custom made an axle that allows them to blend the two designs together. I found two hubs that could potentially fit the bill. One with a thinner axle, which would fit the non-drive side of the Eastons, and one with a thicker axle that would fit the drive side of the Eastons. To get either of them to work however, I would need to swap out at least one bearing.
I decided on the thicker axle variant, partly because it was on special at BDop, but also because I figure a bigger axle is probably a good thing to have in a wheel. As an added bonus, the on special hub also came with Novatec's Anti Bite Guard (ABG) freehub which will (allegedly) stop the cassette gouging out channels in the aluminium freehub body. It was possibly a little more than I was hoping, but still cheaper than if I'd purchased OEM Easton parts, especially once shipping was taken into account.
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| Donor hub - Novatec 482SB-SL |
Disassembly was a fairly simply affair, especially given the Easton hub had practically self-disassembled. Taking apart the Novatec hub was also a relatively painless exercise, though it required more rubber mallet than I'm used to with the Easton hubs.
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It still needs to be tested, though it all seems to be holding together. It probably remains to be seen whether the freehub alignment is correct. Amusingly, in frustration, I've gone out and purchased a new set of wheels for my CX bike, so it's likely that these wheels might just sit idle in the short term. Hopefully I can find a use for them, since it would seem a shame to go to the effort to fix them and not use them.
Thanks for reading! :)
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