If it's just for fun, then find an old set of wheels from before cassette
hubs - one with a freewheel. Then remove the freewheel and screw on a track
cog. Any wheel that old will likely have narrow spacing. In fact the
wheels on your old bike might work fine. And your cranks will work fine
too.

If you find you like riding a fixed then you can start thinking about
upgrading parts. I always used old stuff sitting around for years. Once I
even used a Biopace chainrring - it's excentricity was dispersed eveningly
so the chain didn't change tension too much.

Fixed can be fun.

-Bruce


"Suzy Jackson" wrote in message
...
Hi all,

I did a nice 70km ride on the weekend with a bunch of local troublemakers,
one of whom rode the whole time without once coasting. This strange
behaviour got me to thinking, I've got an old steel roadie in the garage
with those much sought after horizontal dropouts, and a rear triangle that
was brazed together when five speed freewheels were plentiful, that's been
quietly gathering dust since I built my go faster aluminium massively
overgeared clicky lever bike.

So I thought about it a bit, and figured it'd be lots of fun to put track
cranks and wheels on it, and throw away that nasty back brake for ever,
and
see if I can break myself of this terrible coasting habit. Further down
the
track (pun entirely intended) I could go and talk to a framebuilder and
get
a real track frame (or perhaps even a box of tubes and lugs), put my shiny
new cranks and wheels on it, and see how much I can scare myself going
around in circles (but always pedalling of course).

In any case, I cast around on the net looking for suitable candidates, and
decided Record is ridiculously expensive, as is Dura-Ace. Next down the
list seems to be the Miche Primato bits, which seem at first glance to
strike a good compromise between shinyness and expense. Are they as nice
as
they look? I see they use cartridge bearings. What do I do when said
bearings disintegrate? I'm used to my nice Campy cup & cone hubs where
one
simply pulls everything apart and gives it all a scrub and some nice new
grease occasionally, and one can buy new balls and new cones should the
need
arise.

The next issue is that the cranks are 135mm PCD, whereas most other track
cranks seem to be 144. Is this likely to cause grief?

Finally, is it an issue squeezing the back end of a 126mm wide bike down
to
120mm? It's had 130mm wide wheels forced into it before without
significant
complaint.

Anyways, I was hoping to con some advice out of others who use these bits.

Regards,

Suzy