June 9, 2025

Restoring my Peugeot PX-10 - Wheels

My bike came with 27 inch clincher rims. I ran sewups for a while. They were fun, but I finally decided they were more trouble than they were worth and sold those wheels.

Now the question is putting 700C clincher wheels on the bike.

The main thing here is to avoid a wheel that uses a cassette. The cassette will be too wide and require the frame to be spread.

At first I thought that spreading the frame was something I absolutely wanted to avoid, but now I am giving it real consideration. It only needs to go from 126mm to 130mm. A change of 4mm! They call doing this "cold setting" a frame and it is only recommended for a steel frame (and the PX10 is a steel frame!).

• Cold setting a bike frame

700C wheels that use a freewheel are available and will do what I want.

700C is 622mm (24.5 inches).
27 inch is 630mm -- just a bit bigger, so you would fight to mount a 700C tire.

The idea is that a tire mounted on a 700C rim would be 700mm in diameter, but of course this varies with the tire. The idea with a 27 inch rim, is that the tire ends up 27 inchs in diameter (686mm).