Well, they are generally right.....

Well partially.....

So the logical choice seemed to be to remove the wheels off the summer bike and transfer them to the winter bike. The wife wanted me to use the new bike, I wanted new wheels. You may have seen her comment on my previous post, felt like I may lose this battle but thankfully I wasn't required to sleep in the shed ;-)

This seems like a decent compromise. The wheels from the new bike go on to the old bike and I buy new wheels for the new bike at some point in the future, it's not like it's going to get used this side of Christmas anyway.....

The only obstacle this posed was the removal and replacment of the cassette as the winter bike is a 9 speed (triple) and the summer bike a 10 (double).

I borrowed a cassette removal tool from a mate at work -

Removal of the 9 speed cassette was fairly straight forward once I understood how the chain whip worked, the spikes held tension from the spokes, took me a while and a text message to work that one out. Use 'youtube' he said, literally no video's I found had this tool set in use.

I simply couldn't remove the 10 speed cassette from the wheel of the new bike, I couldn't get the whip to hold tension on the wheel (well, not without ruining it anyway). So I popped along to see the guys at my LBS, met the mechanic who literally took the wheel and bought it back to me a moment later with the cassette in a bag. job done. He used one of these.....

So I bought one. Makes the job a piece of cake, literally. I must have been in town for 25 minutes max, love it when I don't have to wait for service.

Anyhoo, after sorting the cassette's all I had to do was put the new wheels on the old bike and adjust the brakes to the new rims. This gave me the chance to fit new brake pads on the rear as there was nothing left of the current pads.

So the old bike has new rims and looks all the better for it. Now ready for a full winters commute without me needing to worry if the wheel was going to collapse.

The new bike on the other hand is looking a little sorry for itself, rims with no tyres and wheels with no cassette. It ain't going anywhere, anytime soon.

.....but I WILL be buying some decent wheels at some point before next summer, now I just need to decide which new wheels, ow dilemma's.....