Electric blue to Jeff Bruce

So that was the good news... now for the bad. Basically the drive side bearings are shot
The drive side cone is pitted quite badly, and basically they are near impossible to find new anymore. Also sadly as well the drive side cup is pitted too, this was quite hard to photograph but there is a decent pit in there... I will state for the record that @lot14 was completely honest and I bought these at the risk that they would be like this.

The non-drive side is fine though, perfectly smooth with no pits on cups or cone

It's these two parts that need replacing. The other parts like the pawls and springs you can still get, as well as the NDS Cone and cups.

So need to think about what my options are. It's near impossible to buy replacement cones/cups these days, the only option is to source a NOS hub for donor parts as these two parts are shared with a lot of the older 8/9sp hubs. Or alternately cut my losses and try to find different hubs, the later model '99-'06 with the oversized axles are much better in terms of parts availability and are a fair bit lighter.

However these seem like really special hubs as they are the last of the traditional Campagnolo hubs with threaded axles and adjusted with cone wrenches. After this generation they went to oversized 15mm axles and floating cup/cones which don't need a press to install. However these hubs were all clear anodised from what I can tell and look chunkier, so not as traditional.

Alright... so I decided to go all in and bought a NOS Athena/Veloce 8sp hub. These still have the cup and cone design and should have those spare parts. The DS cone is basically impossible to find new, same with the DS Cup. I had to replace the pawls anyway so it made sense to do this in my mind. Particularly as these hubs are quite rare and special

It came with manuals, even the R clip for holding the free hub pawls when installing... simply amazing as it was like a time capsule from 1997

And man... this thing is heavy. It weighs more than a pair of lightweight modern hubs!

So straight away I tore it apart and it looks like it was the right type. It has the DS cone on the axle, looks definitely NOS. Also the DS cup and balls are correct. The odd thing about these hubs is the NDS has 1/4" (6.35mm) balls and the DS has 7/32" (5.56mm) balls

Old axle on the left with shagged DS cone and OK NDS Cone. Donor hub axle on the right with NOS cones

So this is why the Athena hub weighs so much... The free hub itself is a chonkyboi, weights almost about as some whole complete rear hubs! The whole thing is made of steel, whereas the Record one has a Titanium inner and alloy external

Axle saves a decent amount of weight...

Not unusual for your balls to be slightly different sizes.

I don’t think anyone is perfectly symmetric 😅

Ok some hub surgery. First step was to remove the pitted cup from the drive side and also the donor cup. This wasn't too hard actually, I was a bit worried it might not be so easy. However I used a heat gun to heat up the alloy hub shell and used an expanding collet bearing extractor to get a grip on the cup and tapped it out on the other side with a drift. Took a few decent whacks but came out reasonably quickly on both hubs.

Now pressed the donor cup into the hub, again I preheated the hub to make it a bit easier. Luckily I had a bearing press which more or less fit the cup and it went in quite easily.

Now onto the free hub, the bearings in this were smooth but had a bit of play and were oozing black goo, so had probably ground themselves into oblivion over the years. The first one was easy to pull out as was the spacer, but the next were held in by a circlip without any eyes to use a plier... After trying for 1/2 hour I googled this and a common solution was to drill a tiny 1mm hole in the free hub to push the circle out of the way. Which worked a treat.

Bearings are out, lots of black goo so definitely need to replaced, I noticed the factory ones are SKF which is nice. They are standard bearings, 2x 6801 and 1x 6901

Replaced them with SKF ones as well, apparently there are a lot of counterfeit bearings (yes truly) out there so I bought them from one of the SKF official retailers, not cheap the three bearings were a shade under £50...

Now back to the axle and removing the DS cone, I ordered some alloy/steel tubes off eBay with the correct inside diameter so they could be used to remove and install the cone. Worked like a treat luckily, I was a bit worried for some reason that it might not fit, but the cone fit perfectly

Now for the fun bit. Hubs are back together again and I gave them a polish.

Also weighed them, actually pretty respectable given they are a traditional 10mm axle design. A lot lighter than the donor hub

Also managed to track down some correct Record skewers too

Quality work here, great job

Now for the wheel build. So these are the wheel build specs

Rims: Borg22 AKA Kinlin XR22T. Polished finish for that bling shiny look. I have had good experiences with Kinlin rims, they are nicely finished and build up very round. I also am a big fan of tubeless rims so will run these as such. I will lace these with nipple washers on the DS rear as they will have a fair bit more tension and will need to work hard.

Spokes: Front: Sapim Laser. Rear: Sapim Laser NDS and Sapim Race DS. The Sapim lasers are the super light spoke from Sapim with a 1.5mm middle section and 2.0mm ends. The Race are the standard 1.8mm middle section double butted spokes. I've never built with Lasers before, but I have heard they have a tendency to twist more easily due to their thinness, also not recommended for disc brake wheels. However as I weigh 64kg and these will be 32 spoke 3x front and rear, I'm doubtful I will have any issues.

The Sapim Lasers are noticeably thinner. Weight saving is not insignificant, at roughly 95g for 64 spokes compared to the Sapim Race.




Rear wheel with Sapim HM Nipple washers on the DS. These spread the load on the rim around and also make them easier to rotate. This should be good enough to go up to max 130kgf



The hub flanges on the rear were somewhat thick and the Laser elbows on the outside needed a little persuasion to get around the bend. I was getting slightly uneven tension until I squeezed the spoke pairs several times to get them to bend a bit better, this helped settle them into the holes a lot better and the tension evened out quickly

All done. So a bit over 1700g for the whole wheelset, not too bad for an old 32h set.

Great dedication, it’s going to be lovely

Great dedication, it’s going to be lovely

Very much this, really enjoying this thread.

Now the other day I felt something really odd, the BB all of a sudden had a serious crunch feeling in it as the cranks went around... something was wrong and I pulled apart the BB

These Campag BB's uniquely have 2x bearings on the DS with a single on the NDS. The NDS bearing (Open on the inside face with rubber seal on outer NDS face) felt very crunchy. I had a minor issue when installing this initially, the BB was binding as I was threading in the NDS cup which eventually went away. My theory is that the NDS bearing cup was sitting out too far, it might have slipped out of position for some reason and some gunk in the frame slipped inside and got caught between the middle shell and the bearing and got into the races which explains the binding, and later the crunchiness..

Anyway, I ordered a genuine NTN replacement bearing with the LLB non-contacting seals. These are more suitable to the lower RPM of a typical BB. I still find it crazy that there are a lot of counterfeit bearings so I ordered this from a bike shop who gets them from the official importer. not cheap at about £20 but still cheaper than a new Chorus BB which is £65. The NDS is held on by a simple wire circlip, so very simple to replace. the DS has some kind of crazy circlip, doing a bit of research it's difficult to remove without damaging it, luckily those bearings were totally fine.

Again, these were quite easy to remove, I had a spare bearing puller. Installing the new bearing just involved purchasing a cheap piece of aluminium tube with an ID of 17mm to match the axle and tapping these on gently. Felt like new, and left both rubber seals on to prevent any other gunk from ever getting in again.

Looking at that wrapover seatstay i'd say that's a Rourke.

Ok bit of an update. I was having some issues with the headset as it's quite badly indexed, divots on the bearing races. This was exacerbated on this bike, due to the steep 74º head angle, any notchiness on the steering was really obvious. Not all the parts are easily available NOS so I had to make do and went ahead with replacing the races is one of the cups as they appeared to interchange with other models.

NOS Athena (but the early 90's one) on the left and original Mid 90's Athena indexed one on the right. Races have been removed, luckily my bearing press for some reason is a perfect interference fit with the races, I did this accidentally when installing the cups into the head tube in the past.

NOS Race going into the original cup... fits perfectly! Only the outer alloy cup is different in appearance but fits the same race. Bearing press for sealed bearing hubs came into use again as it fit more or less...

And I have a basically new cup with NOS race... I had to replace the entire upper cup and also the crown race as these were indexed with NOS versions.

And now for the finished pics

Gosh, this is lovely stuff

Intrigued with one detail of your wheel build ... why only use nipple washers on the DS? Higher tension on that side, ie not needed on NDS so why add weight? I think I've answered my own question there.

Beautifully done. Looks great!

Yeah that's basically it. The rear DS spokes need to be brought up high enough so you can get an OK tension on the NDS, so that ends up being reasonably high 120kgf ish. This is pretty high so need to avoid concentrating too much stress on the rim, so the nipple washers help with this , much like eyelets in the old days. The NDS and front spokes don't need to have such high tension so nipple washers are just unnecessary. Weight not really a consideration as they don't even weigh much.

In this case the 130mm OLD spaced wheels with 9-11sp cassettes generally are about as bad as you get with the amount of dish. Modern 135/142mm OLD spaced wheels are better in this regard.

Yeah 130 dish is sub-optimal. I've always wondered about whether the CTC rag's tech guy was right about using single-butted spokes DS on heavily dished wheels, and DB or TB on the NDS ... I've tried it once but of course can't really say whether it was 'better' as I hadn't built all the same parts with equal spokes to compare. Lots of other wheel heads have argued this is BLX but I can't really say why they felt that, in technical/engineering terms. Or couldn't be bothered to remember, it was the artist formerly known as 'Tester' after all.

Great tinkering and the end result is even better!
I had never thought about changing races in cup & cone hubs before...

Edit: So on Campag hubs the cones are a pressfit onto the axle? Interesting they are not screw-on like Shimano.

On this generation of Campag hubs the DS cone is pressed onto the axle. NDS is threaded for adjustment.

Yeah tbh I was not sure about replacing cups but it is totally possible. I used to think that if the cup was pitted the hub was basically toast!

Good to meet this morning @ghettro - really enjoyed the thread and finished project looks great.

What did you replace the tyres with in the end?

It's a bit of a secret project which I'll probably start a thread on it, I got a 90's fillet brazed Reynolds 731 OS frame with wishbone seat stays, it has bugger all clearance say max 25mm. Thus I had to sell the tyres on this bike and the plan is to respray that frame and swap all the bits from the Dave Hinde onto it. I have Vittoria Corsa Pro TLR in 24mm which fit nicely.

So my plan is to swap the components onto another frame, my original goal was to build a 90's race bike and I think the Brian Rourke/Dave Hinde was a bit too tall and the frame was actually from the late 70's.

So I bought this frame off the forum a few months ago for a song. What attracted it to me was the unusual Reynolds 731os tubing and the wishbone seat stay detail, all fillet brazed together apart from the BB. These appeared to be the mark of a high end frame that was unique.

Doing a bit of research on the forum, it looks like it has changed hands a few times...
I found it on retrobike from 2020 from someone who got it on eBay

Then it looks like @Pancake had it 3 years ago and sold it on

Then it went to @Juice.Bikes I think who I bought it off. It had been resprayed in what is actually a cool paint scheme, however it was with rattle can it looks like, and easily chipped.