Hitchcocks Forum

Hi, I spoked in a new wheel rim, i centered it to the middle of the hub, but according to the distance from both for legs it seems te be off-centre.
Should an enfield wheel be spoked 'ou of centre'?

Without knowing what model and year it would only be guessing to answer. REgards, Mark

Have you got a spacer left on the bench.

If you have one fork leg thicker than the other, to provide additional strength for a disc brake or one is mismatched from an earlier/later model, then the wheel will not sit equidistant between the fork leg inside edges which is the natural place to measure from. The rear can often be built with an off of centre rim to overcome other issues but on a conventional front end there shouldn’t be any reason for the rim not to sit dead centre between the forks.

The early disc brake models had clearance problems with the rotor bolts so the wheel was over spaced on the calliper side to overcome this but the wheel rim wasn’t initially moved back to compensate. On my ElectraX I seem to recall removing 1.5mm off the spacer to sit the wheel central then modified something else to permit the wheel to spin. That corrected the problem of the wheel sitting 3mm off centre.
So in answer to your question sometimes the wheel might be built with an off centre rim to compensate for problems not normally found on other motorcycles. To put that in perspective I’ve moved my front and rear rims in opposite directions to compensate for poor Enfield production/quality control issues.