Finishing Wheel No. 1

It’s the following evening and Schraner’s name is still mud. There’s one further method of his that I want to try before finally throwing his stupid book in the bin, then declaring him the anti-Musson and unequivocally damning him to hell!

With a significantly dished wheel such a 9 speed rear, the non-drive side spokes on the finished wheel will be noticeably less tight than those on the drive side - fact. Therefore, there’s a risk that there will not be sufficient tension in the non-drive side spokes to prevent them becoming fatigued at the elbow over time and eventually failing. The limiting factor in obtaining sufficient non-drive side spoke tension is the amount of spoke tension on the drive side: quite simply, the more you have there, the more you can have on the non-drive side.

Schraner’s method is to crank up the drive side nipples to obtain the maximum tension there before putting any tension at all in the non-drive side spokes. Then as you gradually tighten up the non-drive side nipples the rim is pulled over towards the centre, adding yet more tension to the drive side spokes and so enabling you to use more tension in the non-drive side spokes as a result. All fine in theory!

Thanks to Musson’s advice about how to use the nipple driver to take up the initial slack in the spokes, the wheel is still remarkably true both radially and laterally, and getting these to within about 0.5mm either way is no problem as I’ve done this on lots of wheels previously. The dish is pretty good too: the rim still needs pulling a few millimetres towards the non-drive side, but this is in line with expectations and will happen as I continue to tighten up the non-drive side nipples.

Another couple of turns on the non-drive side nipples and the dish is now near enough spot-on, and the trueness is still good enough for now. Up to this point I’ve been going over old ground that I had previously covered when building my first two wheels a couple of years back. The next task is to get the spoke tension equal in all the spokes on each side of the wheel. This is what I did not do with those previous wheels as it wasn’t adequately explained in Sheldon Brown’s guide, my only point of reference at the time. This is absolutely vital. If you don’t equalise the spoke tension then the wheel will be unbalanced, even if it is apparently true at the outset (which won’t last), and the spokes will die young as a consequence. Musson’s book explains why this is so far better than I can and he goes on to describe exactly what’s required at this point in crystal clear fashion. It takes me little time to get all the spokes singing quite literally to the same tune.

Nearly finished… final tensioning involves a half turn on all the nipples, which are now really stiff (oh do behave!), but this time I need to make sure to get rid of any twisting in the highly-tensioned spokes, so after each half-turn I back the Spokey off by 1/8th of a turn. A final check on the trueness, dish, tension and stress relieving and… I think it’s worked! By comparing the new wheel with the existing rear wheel on the Inbred, which was built to an acceptable standard by Merlin Cycles and has 32 spokes, the first thing I note is that I’ve obtained much higher spoke tension despite having four extra spokes. This is good news because even though the nipples were becoming quite stiff to turn they were not near to the point where the soft brass would start rounding off. According to both Musson and Schraner, this means that I should still be well within the limitations of the rim eyelets and hub flanges.

If my spoke tension was less than the Merlin wheel then I’d crank them up an extra half turn, but that’s it: job done, in roughly 4 hours or so. Now for a test ride! If this turns out to be my last post then you know that it didn’t go well!