Remove a hub gear or buy new wheel?
is it possible to remove a hub gear and keep the existing wheel? Or should I just get a new rear wheel?


If you remove the hub, what is left? A rim and some spokes... if your goal is to reuse as much as possible, you could possibly lace a new hub to the rim. The problem is that it is pretty unlikely that the spokes will be reusable. Going from one hub to the next, you can occasionally with some decent planning get that to work. With an internal hub going to an externally geared hub it is pretty unlikely as usually internal hubs have a large hub body and very tall flanges. This causes them to use very short spokes that would never reach the flanges of a standard hub. You could look into it, using online spoke length calculators, and see if there is a hub that would let you reuse the spokes.

However, building a wheel this way is not a great introduction to wheelbuilding! Used spokes, used rim.. it will all behave differently and go together with more difficulty than new parts due to inconsistencies and wear.

If you would like to take that on AND you can reuse the spokes, it will probably be cheaper than a new wheel. If you can't reuse the spokes, it would end up being cheaper to just buy a new rear wheel (not even taking into account that you may get a small amount of money for the current rear wheel).