Filing Dropouts

[Tom B]

I'm thinking of doing this on a vintage bike to allow fitting of a new front wheel. The axle spindle is just slightly too wide to fit, maybe 1mm each way. There's plenty of metal on both sides of the dropout

Has anyone done this? Will it take long? What sort of tool should I use?

[andygates]

Clamp the dropout horizontal in a bench vice and use an ordinary half-round metal file.  It'll take up to fifteen minutes per dropout depending on skill.  Paint the exposed metal with primer immediately you finish.

Though if it's that small a difference, you may be able to fettle the bits on the axle to use thinner locknuts instead, which would be preferable.

[Biggsy]

Rather than anything to do with distance between dropouts or the locknuts, I'm assuming the diameter of a modern axle is too large to fit the forks.  This is what I found with my old Raleigh 531 forks.  A few minutes with a hand file did the job.

File a bit, test with wheel, repeat as necessary.

I didn't bother painting because paint tends to flake off that place anyway.

[Tom B]

I'm assuming the diameter of a modern axle is too large to fit the forks

This is correct, sorry I didn't make it clear.
And thanks for the quick response!

Tom

[andygates]

Oh right, the axle's just too fat?  Yeah, just hand file it like Biggsy said.  Did it for a skip-fixie a few years ago: the only challenge is doing it evenly so the wheel sits nice and square.

[rogerzilla]

I found the (unthreaded) SON front hub is tight in some forks.