Originally Posted by
revcp
I also just built up a 29 wheelset with Spank Oozy Trail 345 rims for my Salsa El Mariachi. Very nice rims. $65 on sale. I'm looking at building up Spank Oozy Trail 395 in 27.5 for my Beargrease. The drawback with that is that 3" is the smallest I could go because of bottom bracket height (not sure whether your older Muk geometry would play nice with 27.5"), and I might want the option of going 2.5", so I'm undecided at this point between 29" and 27.5". I have some time to think about it.
I would be interested in hearing what you decide to do.
You brought up some good questions.
As far as weight goes, I don't know how any wheel set can be heavier than what I'm running now! Well, slime inner tubes and no-flats liners would make it even more ghetto.
I still need to find out whether 27+ will actually fit the Mukluk 1 using the 27+ boost 148 physical measurements from another wheelset I have.
The original anodized blue Salsa hubs on the bike are pretty. I think I read a long time ago that these are rebadged basic Novatec hubs. The rear hub seems to have symptoms of one pawl being slightly damaged. I'll have to replace the freewheel eventually.
I found a pair of Quando hubs in China for only $40/free shipping. Is that brand a disaster in the making? They look legitimate.
One of the major drawbacks to the original Mukluk is that the chain line, as it was built, is biased to far inside, which makes the chain just barely graze the rear tire sidewall.
In practice the friction isn't that much, and all of the tires I've gone through didn't really suffer terminal damage from it before the tread wore out.
The real bummers about that are of course I want to run the smallest tire I can get in there, avoid using the granny, have mental thoughts about drag when grinding up endless grades, and the worst, is fouling the chain with mud and sand etc in bad conditions.
Just building a different rear wheel is a thought I've had. That way, continuing to enjoy this bike rigid, I can employ the light compliance of the Vee Tire H-Billie 4.25 tire I have up front, which set up tubeless flawlessly.
Of course I've thought about changing to 1x drive, but I need the range of gears and I don't want to spend a lot more on this bike, because going that far adds enough cost to consider abandoning the Mukluk entirely for a different platform.
But just changing the rear wheel to 27.5 + if it fits, will affect the handling as well. It might not be an improvement at all.
Small potatoes right.
Okay the thing I really wanted to say was that I was at a local family bike shop to get some platform pedals for my recovery today and I asked about 170 rear hubs if any in stock.
I told the guy about my idea and how the 170 standard is obsolete. To my surprise he said that actually they have a lot of 170 rear hub bikes in stock, pointing to them, which are a popular big fat BMX wheelie trick bike format now. I had no idea.