lulubel
Über Member
- Location
- Malaga, Spain
This is a follow on from this thread:
http://www.cyclechat.net/threads/buying-handbuilt-wheels.96622/
(It moved away from talking about buying handbuilt wheels to building them yourself.)
I've just completed my first wheel, almost to my satisfaction. I don't think it will ever be possible to be totally satisfied with a wheel because you can go on making tiny, tiny adjustments forever and never get it absolutely perfect. But I think it's close.
I downloaded The Professional Guide to Wheelbuilding (which cost £9) and read it very thoroughly a couple of times before I did anything, and came to the conclusion that wheelbuilding didn't seem that difficult. I kind of followed the instructions to make tools, and ended up with a slightly wonky nipple driver, a truing stand that was very much my own unique design and a dishing gauge that didn't work very well! The only tool I bought was a spoke wrench.
I used DT Swiss RR 465 rims (which I got a lot cheaper than this from Planet-X, but their stock appears to be all gone now), Shimano 105 hubs and DT Competition spokes. I originally planned to use Sapim Race spokes, but the only shop I found that had them in the lengths I needed was trying to charge me over £500 shipping! (They did reply when I asked them for a corrected price, but they took a couple of days, and by that time I'd ordered the DT spokes.) Most places only sold the spokes in even lengths. I needed odd, and decided getting the lengths as close as possible was important for my first wheels.
The book has instructions for the rear wheel (presumably because it's more complicated) so that was the one I started with. Once I finished lacing it, I felt like my spoke tensions were all over the place, so I put it aside and started the front one, which went much better.
Lacing was quite easy - just follow the instructions - but truing is another matter. I found the silver braking surface very distracting when I was checking the lateral and radial trueness - it isn't perfectly even and makes the wheel look wobbly when it isn't - so I ended up using a small piece of cardboard as my gauge. I held it so the edge was just touching the rim and rustled slightly as it turned. If the rustling got louder or stopped altogether, I knew I had an out of true spot to correct.
Getting the tensions the same took the longest. I don't have a very good ear, so had to spend a lot of time checking and re-checking, and trying to determine if the tone was the same, or higher or lower.
For some reason (and I'm not quite sure why) I didn't get on with the dishing gauge I made, so I resorted to putting the brakes back on my forks, which I was using as my truing stand, and repeatedly turning the wheel around and making adjustments until I had the rim centered between the brakes regardless of which way I put it in the forks. It was probably more time consuming, but at least it was accurate.
The worst part was stressing the wheel and final tensioning. To stress the wheel, you grip 4 spokes and squeeze tightly, which I found difficult because my hands are small, and I'm also aware that there's a big difference in strength between me and the majority of people building wheels, so I was trying to squeeze them as tight as I could. I wasn't really sure how tight the spokes needed to be, so ended up with tighter than the spokes on my OH's bike (front wheel) and a lot tighter than on my trainer bike, which is a cheap bike with even cheaper wheels, so I figure they're badly made.
I'm happy that the wheel is true (in every direction), the spoke tensions are fairly even, and they're tighter than any wheel on our other bikes, but I'm not confident that I've built a safe wheel. I'll probably be very careful for quite a while.
But I am a lot more confident about the truing process now, and quite happy to get on with truing the rear.
The front wheel took me about 6-7 hours from start to finish.
http://www.cyclechat.net/threads/buying-handbuilt-wheels.96622/
(It moved away from talking about buying handbuilt wheels to building them yourself.)
I've just completed my first wheel, almost to my satisfaction. I don't think it will ever be possible to be totally satisfied with a wheel because you can go on making tiny, tiny adjustments forever and never get it absolutely perfect. But I think it's close.
I downloaded The Professional Guide to Wheelbuilding (which cost £9) and read it very thoroughly a couple of times before I did anything, and came to the conclusion that wheelbuilding didn't seem that difficult. I kind of followed the instructions to make tools, and ended up with a slightly wonky nipple driver, a truing stand that was very much my own unique design and a dishing gauge that didn't work very well! The only tool I bought was a spoke wrench.
I used DT Swiss RR 465 rims (which I got a lot cheaper than this from Planet-X, but their stock appears to be all gone now), Shimano 105 hubs and DT Competition spokes. I originally planned to use Sapim Race spokes, but the only shop I found that had them in the lengths I needed was trying to charge me over £500 shipping! (They did reply when I asked them for a corrected price, but they took a couple of days, and by that time I'd ordered the DT spokes.) Most places only sold the spokes in even lengths. I needed odd, and decided getting the lengths as close as possible was important for my first wheels.
The book has instructions for the rear wheel (presumably because it's more complicated) so that was the one I started with. Once I finished lacing it, I felt like my spoke tensions were all over the place, so I put it aside and started the front one, which went much better.
Lacing was quite easy - just follow the instructions - but truing is another matter. I found the silver braking surface very distracting when I was checking the lateral and radial trueness - it isn't perfectly even and makes the wheel look wobbly when it isn't - so I ended up using a small piece of cardboard as my gauge. I held it so the edge was just touching the rim and rustled slightly as it turned. If the rustling got louder or stopped altogether, I knew I had an out of true spot to correct.
Getting the tensions the same took the longest. I don't have a very good ear, so had to spend a lot of time checking and re-checking, and trying to determine if the tone was the same, or higher or lower.
For some reason (and I'm not quite sure why) I didn't get on with the dishing gauge I made, so I resorted to putting the brakes back on my forks, which I was using as my truing stand, and repeatedly turning the wheel around and making adjustments until I had the rim centered between the brakes regardless of which way I put it in the forks. It was probably more time consuming, but at least it was accurate.
The worst part was stressing the wheel and final tensioning. To stress the wheel, you grip 4 spokes and squeeze tightly, which I found difficult because my hands are small, and I'm also aware that there's a big difference in strength between me and the majority of people building wheels, so I was trying to squeeze them as tight as I could. I wasn't really sure how tight the spokes needed to be, so ended up with tighter than the spokes on my OH's bike (front wheel) and a lot tighter than on my trainer bike, which is a cheap bike with even cheaper wheels, so I figure they're badly made.
I'm happy that the wheel is true (in every direction), the spoke tensions are fairly even, and they're tighter than any wheel on our other bikes, but I'm not confident that I've built a safe wheel. I'll probably be very careful for quite a while.
But I am a lot more confident about the truing process now, and quite happy to get on with truing the rear.
The front wheel took me about 6-7 hours from start to finish.
