I found a nice used pair of wheels at a flea market, for a good price of 25€. It is a standard pair of 28"-wheels: The axle width are 100mm (front width) and 130mm (rear width). The wheels should be appropriate to almost any of 1980...2000s bicycles. The rear wheel has also the wanted thread for a 5- or 6-gear sprocket wheel cassette (cogset), a perfect match to METEOR and exactly what I've searching for as a replace for the heavy-weighting 3-gear Sturmey-Archer hub.

Front wheel from flea market, unmodified (wide nut)

Less funny was the realizing the wheels are not matching into METEORs frame. Its fork width was 90mm, the rear width 120mm only. I haven't noticed that before and no clue what to do now.

I browsed many web sites formerly hosted by the bicycle genius Sheldon Brown. He describes a method to match wheels to frames by altering bushings on the axle (so-called 're-spacering').

To do so, one had to consider:

• the cogset must fit between frame and rear wheel;
• the rims must run centered in the frame;
• neither the fork nor the rear dropout must be bent apart or tilted.

A true imposition: Depending of the axles threads, I have searched the net for the needed nuts, bushings, and so on. The following table gave me a slight hint how complicated the matter really is:

(external link to wikipedalia.com) Table with thread measures

All these indications were confusing me deeply, because I´m living in a "metric spere" here in Germany and I wasn't aware with the imperial-alike threads in this table (which are actually a 'blend-o-mixture' of threads in more than 100 years of cycle technology history).

OK... the flea market wheels do have FG9,5 (Fahrradgewinde 9,5mm) = Bicycle thread 9,5mm) axles. Matching parts can be purchased at ebay, fortunately.

Rare narrow nut. 'Auslaufteil' means: No new manufacturing, remainder of stock

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Front wheel, respacered, with special FG9.5 narrow nuts applied

Result: The axle width is now mathing with the frame, but I had to file the front wheel axle clamp from 8.5mm to 9.5mm to fay:

Original clamp size was 8,5mm while axle diameter is 9,5mm...

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Proper filing - done well    :-D

The axles ball bearing then got all new grease, the rims also got trued well. The tire, model "Schwalbe Delta Cruiser" (ERTRO 37-622), in used but good condition, came from my stock.

Next Chapter: The rear wheel