fastpedaller wrote:My thoughts (for what they're worth) are that it's best to keep the forks as they are - It's a lot easier to give the wheel some dish than it is to modify the forks. Secondly if the width of the hub is anything but (about) 100mm then the wheel won't fit other bikes. I'd space the hub so that it is 100mm, as near to equal distance for both flanges, and of course so that no parts clash with the forks. The rim is then centred to be between the locknuts on the axle. It may only be 1mm of difference in spoke length between the 2 sides, so will be of no consequence. The last sentence assumes the same spoke hole diameter on the hub flanges, which may not be the case!
I'm very much with fastpedaller on this. I've never sprung front forks open myself, and as far as I know I've never known anyone who has tried, but apart from stressing the blades by bending them out, what stress/damage would you be doing to the brazing of the blades into the fork-crown? And how would you re-align the dropouts to restore them to perfectly parallel? I've ridden alongside three people whose front forks have failed under them - one was slow-motion and resulted in grass stains, one was noticed before a disaster came about, but the other was normal speed on the road, and resulted in blood - the cause was failure of the braze of one of the fork-blades into the crown..........and it was horrible.
This is something that I personally would never, ever do. A decent framebuilder would build you some forks, bespoke for the job.