A customer brought in a Racing Zero for me to work on.


They brought it in as a wheel to use for component assembly from the frame—not for inspection—
but since there's no inspection history at my shop,
I decided to take a look at it.
The reason is that I don't want to adjust brakes on a wheel where I'm not certain the centering is correct.



The rim is off to the right by about the thickness of a sheet of paper. In cases like this,
as long as there isn't some point where it's wildly out of true,
I can make fine adjustments by tightening the nipples on the left side



and the center naturally comes back into alignment. Though if you overdo it, it'll drift the other way.



Next, the rear wheel.
There's a slight centering offset, but it's not the kind of drift that happens from normal use over time,
so either it was off from the start or there's a history of truing without using a centering gauge.
But that's beside the point—the hub axle rotation is rough and gritty.
This might have been opening a can of worms.


The bearing on the outside of the freehub body appears to be dead.


Rust had seized the freehub body so it wouldn't come out,
so I pulled the freehub-equipped axle out from the hub shell
and drove the freehub body out from the inside by tapping it.


There's secondary rust directly underneath the outer bearing.


Skipping ahead in the timeline a bit, I wiped down the rusted areas with abrasive compound.


I replaced the bearing in the freehub body

with a new one.


The bearing on the left side of the hub shell looked clean with no grease contamination,


but the right side had contaminated grease from around the ratchet mechanism that had seeped in,


so I ended up doing a full hub overhaul.
I cleaned around the flanges too.



I trued the wheel and centered it properly.
By installing the tire, tube, and sprocket,
I can suspend the frame set in the air.

And from here on, work came to a complete standstill.