I’ve been to see the wheel-builder with the front wheel in order that that he can get the spoking pattern and the rim offset noted down, as well as measuring the spoke lengths required.

Since the hub needs to be repainted it makes more sense to strip the wheel down myself so I’ve been down to Machine Mart, bought myself a set of 18-inch bolt croppers and cut the spokes out of the front wheel, now I’ve got to clean up the hub and paint it before I can get the wheel rebuilt.

I’ve put the new rim on order so I can get the centre rib of that painted as well, you can see the way this is to be done in the picture of the 1933 Panther at the head of this Blog.

On the trip to the wheel-builder I also went by a small engineering firm I used to use for repair-work when I was running the bike-school.

The speedometer drive is taken from the front wheel on these old ladies, this is done with a drive-box mounted onto the front brake plate, taking its drive from a gear-wheel mounted on the bearing “nose” of the front hub.

There is a mounting boss fitted onto on the brake plate to take this drive-box and the boss on the brake plate has come loose.

So I took it into the firm, (Specialist Services, to give them a plug).

The boss of the place, Bob, took a look at it, set it upon the bench there and then and TIG-welded it in place from the inside.

He’s done a beautiful job, one that will not show once the paint is on the brake-plate.

Back home and having cut the hub out of the wheel it needed to be cleaned of rust and repainted.

I put a wire brush head onto the angle grinder and tried that on the bare hub, it ate the rust!.

I found that with very little effort the wire brush stripped what was left of the old paint back down to bare metal and also removed the rust leaving a clean, burnished steel surface.

In order to stop this re-rusting immediately, and to kill any rust remaining in the bottom of the pitting, I coated it at once with Kurust and this will also give a solid base for the paint to cling onto.

I already have some high-build etching primer/filler in stock so once the Kurust has had time to cure out, “after 3 hours” according to the bottle, I’ll get a first coat of the primer onto the hub.

I’m probably going to have to compromise between getting a perfect gloss finish and not having too great a thickness of paint on the hub itself here as it will need a fair bit of the primer/filler to fill the worst of the pits up to get a perfect finish but if I have to much paint on the hub it will lift when the hub gets hot under braking, especially with a sidecar hitched to the old girl but after all the intention is to use her on the road and not to have a “show queen”.