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Building A Road Bike In Pictures #3 The Skewers

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With the DC14 quick releases, Tune mixed together aluminum, titanium and carbon to create one of the lightest and nicest road skewers available. Thanks to clever material choices and a slim design, the DC14 achieve an incredible weight of only 33 grams. The aluminum washer on the lever side received an anti-friction coating to guarantee easy opening and closing of the quick releases and to allow rotation of the lever in closed position. The rear skewer uses a titanium road while the front features one in aluminum. More amazingly, there are no weight restrictions to use these skewers.

Chris King Fun Bolts Don’t Need To Be Silver

   

All Chris King singlespeed hubs come with shiny, silver Fun Bolts no matter what color the hubs are. On my newly built Air 9 Carbon, the silver just looked out of place. Since I had made a front skewer, I took the aluminum caps of the Chris King Fun Bolts along to Hofmann Galvanik in Grenchen. That shop does a lot of different galvanic surface treatments and is awesome. Walk in there with just four small aluminum pieces and they’ll anodize them for you within just a couple of days. Right now I have them re-anodize a couple of super-nicely machined aluminum bolts from Jäger Motorsport, which weren’t quite the red I wanted.

Letting The Chips Fly

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When you can’t do any work on your disoriented office PC because the company server - an Aitch Pee - died a horrible death, you go to the basement an turn on the rarely operated lathe. At least, that’s what I did this morning after our mandatory “Znünipouse” (9 o’clock break). My new bike was in dire need of a front wheel skewer, so I slammed a piece of aluminum into the chuck, got my hands dirty and machined one myself. Fun to leave work upstairs for a few hours, let the chips fly and end up with a sharp looking, one of a kind skewer. I haven’t done any metal work in a while and it’s always sweet to stand at a machine again to create something, especially when it’s something bike-related. And although my training as a precision mechanic is already 20 years away, operating a lathe or a mill is like riding a bicycle - once you learned how, you don’t lose those skills. Anyway, the parts now need to get anodized before they get the privilege to clamp the front wheel of the A9C.

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