WARNING! When you cut the tread off, the wheel is going to be HOT. Unfortunately, two of my fingertips reinforced that point the hard way yesterday afternoon. (I’m fine, just a couple of blisters, a bit of pain last night, and a severely deflated ego.) Remember, stupid hurts.
You should vaccuum the dust out of those bearings. We did the same, then trued them on a lathe. If you don’t have a lathe available, perhaps a stationary belt sander, or a sanding drum in a drill press, and use a bolt through the wheel bearings to hold them down on the table.
I just re-found this picture, and I wanted to make one important note for anyone reading this down the line:
We screwed up (pun very much intended) on these wheels in one important area: we didn’t use locknuts on the screws to hold on the sprockets. I remember us adding some Loctite to these nuts, but it apparently didn’t hold. The result was us losing five of six screws on the center wheel sprocket, forcing us to miss our next match (which we lost by two).
Moral of the story? Locknuts, and check them each match.
