Wheel No. 2 Bites Back

I’m not going to go over all the ground covered in describing the building of the first wheel because much of the process is similar, but I did a couple of things a little differently with wheel number two, the matching front wheel to the XT/F519 rear.

First up, I tried a lacing technique described by Sheldon Brown as something an experienced wheel builder might use, and having built only three wheels that’s something I’m clearly not. So the sheer folly of what follows is entirely my own fault! This method involves threading all the spokes into the hub flanges before attaching any of them to the rim, as opposed to doing it one-by-one. It creates a bird’s nest of spokes and it is impossible to tell which one should be going where, so consequently I cocked-up the placement of the all-important first spoke.

The consequences of this would only make themselves apparent later on, but having laced all the leading spokes on the left-hand disc rotor side of the wheel I then compounded this by putting the first trailing spoke in the wrong hole. Four or five spokes later I had the unenviable task of unscrewing several nipples and of course I dropped one into the hollow section of the rim from which it was the Devil’s own job to extract. Overcompensating for this last error, I then mistakenly laced the first side 2-cross, so had to unlace a further nine spokes before finally getting the left hand side correct. It was at this point that I noticed that the decals on the hub were not in line with those on the rim: the result of getting the placement of the first spoke wrong, but I couldn’t be bothered to unlace the damn thing yet again! With hindsight, I should have done so.

From this point, and with the spokes already in the hub, it was dead easy to lace up the right-hand side of the wheel. But unfortunately I’d inserted the spokes in the hub in such a way that now the rim’s valve hole was in the wrong place!

At this point I gave up and went to bed. In any walk of life, when things are going badly it’s often a good idea to walk away and think things over for a bit; a solution will often present itself after a little contemplation. Getting the valve hole in between two crossing spokes, as I had just done, is not a disaster but it can make it difficult to get the pump head onto the valve and it looks downright unprofessional. Everyone will know that you’ve built your own wheels and screwed it up! And believe me, this matters because you wouldn’t be doing this unless you were some kind of perfectionist.

Overnight I figured out what had gone wrong. I’d put the inside spokes on the right- hand side in the wrong way around, i.e. inside spokes where there should be outside spokes, and vice-versa. This meant that the two virtually parallel spokes in between which the valve hole should sit could not be correctly located unless I built a non-symmetrical wheel, with the trailing spokes on the right on the outside and those on the left on the inside. This is of no discernible consequence when the wheel is finished, but it’s not what I was trying to do (previous comment about perfectionism still applies!). The only solution was to unlace and fully remove all the spokes from the right hand side and put them back in the correct way around. And where do you think this comedy of errors left me? Yep, right slap-bang in the middle Gerd Schraner’s unworkable lacing sequence, except that not only was I now faced yet again with the prospect of having to bend 9 recalcitrant inside spokes through the already-laced spokes of the side I’d just completed, but before doing this they first had to be removed from the bloody hub, with the same spoke-bending difficulties!

Having finally figured out what needed to be done, I got the wheel fully laced and ready to be tensioned in fairly short order. Now I wanted to have another go at Schraner’s technique for getting sufficient tension in the looser side of spokes in a dished wheel (it’s the other way around for a dished front wheel). This time I really cranked up the left hand disc side spokes before getting on with the looser right hand spokes, but never the less I still found I needed to put some extra turns on the left hand nipples later on in the tensioning process.

With hindsight, which is of course always 20-20, I can now see that both the stick-all-the-spokes-in-the-hub-first lacing method and Schraner’s tensioning method for dished wheels are best left to very experienced wheel builders to whom the long and involved building process is second nature. If you have to constantly revert to the books, as I do, then unless you’re a champion chess player you will almost certainly overlook the consequences of any changes you make to personalise the building process. This is because they do not become apparent until much later in the process, meaning that if you subsequently find that you need to rectify something, you need to go back several steps, not just one or two, and this in turn results in hours of wasted effort. I will certainly, without a shadow of doubt, be using Wheelpro’s step-by-step guide from now on, as I would have done up to this point if I had any sense!

The tensioning and truing of this wheel was no bother; the dishing took longer than before but I think this was because on one pass I turned the spokes on one side of the wheel the wrong way! The end result looks good: not quite as true as the first wheel, which I had back in the jig by way of a comparison and also to give it a final tweak, but easily good enough and it stands comparison with the existing front wheel that it’s replacing on the Inbred. Test ride time!!