A trip to Linden Engineering for Natasha's new wheel

As you probably read in my previous post, I stripped the splines on Natasha's pusher wheel yesterday.  I called around and Dennis of Linden Engineering in Golden, CO had a black painted one in stock for a good price.

I headed out to Golden around 11:00 AM, using the wife's minivan as I didn't want to put undue miles on the knobby spare tire.  Dennis and his shop are always a busy looking place and today was no different.  Still, he brought out the new wheel and then proceeded to swap the tire from the stripped wheel to the new wheel, while also doing two other tasks apparently!  He's never still for very long!

As Dennis worked to swap the tire around, I walked around the front of his shop and captured these other Urals who are in for work. (Sorry for the picture quality, all I had was the camera on my cellphone)

Army Green, looked in pretty fair shape

Natasha will eventually end up with black rims front and back like this one, pretty ain't it? 

Check out the black painted exhaust pipes as well.  

Note the latest iteration of the URAL logo on the tank

Then there was this Ural Troyka who I realized had once belonged to an acquaintance I made while repairing Natasha's timing gears!  Mike had been the owner of this pretty rig but ended up selling it to Paul.  Now Paul, has lost the use of his legs and is having Dennis modify the Troyka so he can ride it without having to use the rear brake pedal or the shift lever.  Now that's a hard core rider!  I hope to do a writeup about him and his Troyka someday.

These are the front (disc) and rear (drum) brake handles since Paul 

can't operate the standard rear brake pedal

 

 The Kliktronic electronic shifter device, its presently unhooked from the shifter which

is located below and to the right of the black air hoses leading to the carburetor

 

 A previous iteration of the URAL logo.  The work YPAN means URAL in Russian

Nice color scheme eh?

By this time, Dennis was done swapping the tire from the old wheel to the new one and off I went to my home to put it in place of the knobby tire spare wheel.

It took me very little time, lots of practice lately I guess, to swap out the knobby for the DURO tire on the new wheel.  Here's some pictures of the splines involved:

Thankfully, the above photo shows my final drive's spline gears are just fine!

  No need to replace it which would involve rebuilding the dang Final Drive.

The spline conditions on the spare wheel's hub, pretty good

Here's where the pusher tire mounts up, the final drive's spline is in the middle, note the brake shoes 

still have plenty of stopping material.  I cleaned up the greasy mess you see before I installed the new wheel

 

 I didn't think to take a picture of the "virgin" splines on the new wheel before I'd started

putting new grease on the splines but you get the idea

 

New wheel in place, I like the black rims and hub!

Note:  Today I realized and was also told in the sovietsteeds forum that I could have swapped the front and rear wheels and gotten home as well.  You see, the front wheel does not require splines!  Doh.  But that's OK, it would have bugged me to have one wheel buggered up, even if still functioning fine.  

I plan to get a replacement hub, new bearings and bushings and repair the old wheel.  Then I'll have two spare wheels and tires!  All in all, a pretty good learning experience.  Tomorrow, I'll be taking off the other two wheels and servicing the bearings and hubs on them, they're overdue!

Finally, here's a old scooter I saw at Linden's, for the scootering clientele that visit this blog: