Today’s bike repair challenge: The sturdy 28-inch steel and chrome wheels on Quinton’s classic CCM cannot be trued because many spokes are seized.

Solution: Your first step is to pull the tire using methods handed down by your Don Mills neighbor Mr. Harmer, who rebuilt old bikes pillaged from the garbage in the ’60s and ’70s.

He gave bike repair clinics to you and your friend Craig Harmer (his son). The first was how to wield screwdrivers to pull a tire and repair a puncture — pronounced “poonctcha” in Mr. Harmer’s Yorkshire accent.

The screwdriver method can cause some interesting self-inflicted injuries during puncture repairs, so as a boy you purchased CCM tire tools from Norwegian Ski Shop at Don Mills Plaza. The tire tools had better leverage and less sharp edges. You still have them handy in the flotsam and jetsam of bike repair stuff in your toolbox.

Once the tire and tube are pulled, the problem spoke threads on the 1964 CCM get treated with WD-40 plus some Superlube Teflon grease you bought at the Don Mills Canadian Tire — the gift that keeps on giving.

For the half dozen spokes that absolutely will not give, you pay a visit to the gent who owns the Cyclemania bike shop on the Danforth. He produces matching spokes at 50 cents a pop. Some people are scared of this guy’s gruff manner and Eastern European accent. The fact is he is a top-tier bike mechanic and a keener for all things bike-related.

Back at home, you clip out the old spokes with wire cutters and weave the new ones into the wheel’s spoke pattern. Listening to CBC radio gives you the right Karma to wrestle the new spokes into place one by one.

The wheels are now ready to be trued — which will iron out wobbles and make this vintage bike run straight. A cheap true key on the 15 mm setting will do the trick.

To find the major wobbles in the tire you can spin it on the bike fork and use a thumbnail to diagnose the problem areas. This is a cheaper option than a professional truing stand used by bike repair shops.

Then loosen and tighten alternating spokes appropriately to coax the rim back into true.

But it’s getting late and you have a day job. Say a quick thank you to your bicycle repair muse Mr. Harmer, and set your alarm clock.

The next bike repair challenge in our CCM restoration will be an overhaul of the front and rear hubs.

In the meantime, here is…

More on the art and science of bicycle wheel spokes:

Some fascinating background on spokes comes from writer David Fiedler in the Bicycling section of About.com. He describes the beauty and complex functionality of the spoke, including its role to provide integrity to the wheel and to transfer power from the rider to the rubber that hits the road. Even Shakespeare with his rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter could not have paid a better tribute to the bicycle spoke:

The spokes on your bike’s wheels are like the busboys at the restaurant. They’re quiet and out of the way, and it’s pretty much a thankless job. No one ever notices when everything is working well, but without proper set up and operation, all sorts of trouble will break loose.

What Spokes Do

The spokes on your bike may look like little more than metal toothpicks that fill space between the axle and wheel but really, these mighty little dudes have an important job.  They do a couple of things:

• Add strength to your rim
• Transfer your leg power from the hub to the wheel
• Support your weight on the wheel

How Spokes Work

How the spokes accomplish these terrific and heroic feats? First, spokes don’t push outward, holding the rim at bay, like it might seem. Rather, the rim is evenly pulled inward by spokes that are laced through the hub, the center part of the wheel that rotates around the axle, which makes it extraordinarily strong. These spokes coming from the hub then radiate outward to the rim, where they attach to nipples, which are almost like little nuts resting in the rim. The nipples can be screwed down onto threaded tips of the spokes, which increases tension on the rim, and also pulls it slightly to the left or right.

Another important job of spokes? Playing a key role in the transferring the power from your legs to the rim to make the bike go. Enormous force gets applied to the hub of a rear wheel by the chain and gearing when you pedal down hard, and together the spokes carry the power that has gone from your legs to the chain then out to the wheel.  That force driving the bike forward gets distributed among many spokes in a properly aligned wheel, which people usually describe as being “in true.”  When you look at weight distribution, too, even under a very heavy load many spokes help spread out the weight so that it is more evenly carried and doesn’t put too much stress on any single spoke.