I would like to replace the front and rear skewers. They have gray nylon(?)-covered nuts that are irremediably dirty and scarred. None of the local bike shops have the pretty Salsa skewers. OK, I'll order them online... But it turns out that skewers come in different lengths. Which length to order?
Clearly these are 130mm and 160mm long, right? But nobody seemed to have skewers in those lengths. Much more common are 100mm, 110mm, and 145mm. Some tandems have 160mm skewers, apparently, but nobody stocks them.
Well, it turns out I was ignorant about yet another subtlety of bicycle tech. Skewers are measured, not by the length of the skewer but by the O.L.D. or over-locknut-dimension. In other words, the width of the hub axle.
Pushing the skewers into the wheel and checking, the hub axles are exactly the lengths of the un-threaded parts of the skewers in the above picture. Or, 145mm and 110mm.
Doh!
OK, now I can order pretty skewers.
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