Time out

Until I’ve ridden my XT/F519 wheels over a good few hundred miles or until I get around to building my second XT/Sun CR18 wheelset I’ve pretty much run out of stuff to post in this blog! So, unless there appears from out of nowhere a sudden rush of contributions by way of comments under any of my previous daily postings, things will now go quiet here for the next few weeks or so.

Some folk have asked about pictures, which is a very good point and something that I aim to get around to in the meantime. It’s not that I don’t have lots of piccies to publish, it’s just that posting pictures on www.blogger.com requires a bit of HTML knowledge which I don’t really have. In any case, even if I was a web-publishing god (obviously, I’m not) it’s not something that I could do from a commuter train, so they’ll appear as and when I can fit it in around work, family and play. But it’ll probably happen sometime!

If you’re temped to have a go at building your own wheels, now’s the ideal time to do something about it. September always sees the cycling retailers put on huge sales to clear out their old stock in preparation for the new season’s goodies and Christmas, and already there are some super bargains to be had. I’ve got my eye on a few bits and bobs myself, but more because I’m easily tempted than because I really need them, but I’m tempted nevertheless. It’s actually quite easy for the amateur wheel builder because the hardest parts to source are spokes, and until the UK retailers wake up and smell the coffee anyone with any sense will buy their spokes from www.rose.de, which just leaves us to find the rims and hubs domestically.

I urge you to have a look around – currently you can buy a pair of Mavic F519 rims for under £40 and a pair of XT hubs also for under £40, both brand new from on-line retailers, so just imagine what could be negotiated on Ebay! Add £15 for spokes from Rose and you’ll be able to build a fantastic pair of wheels for far less than even Chain Reaction will sell them, just like I have been able to. What are you waiting for? GO FOR IT! And don’t forget to tell us all about it.

Can It Pay?

I love messing around with bikes and while sitting bored on delayed trains (i.e. where I type up this blog!) I’ve often wondered if it would be possible for an enthusiast, like me, to make a living out of the cycling industry. My gut feel is that even if it is possible, which is by no means certain, it won’t be an easy ride. The likes of Wiggle (profits increased from £2m to £11m, apparently) and their ilk succeed because they’re run like proper businesses, not because they’re the “logical extension” of someone’s hobby or garage workshop. After all, Roger Musson, the guy who wrote the Wheelpro guide (and whom I note has also posted a very prophetic note under yesterday’s entry: I’d already written most of this one, honest!), gave it all up because of the encroachment into his market of the mail order shops with their discount wheel builds. He wouldn’t, or more likely couldn’t, compete with them. So is it possible to make a living out of building wheels?

One of the biggest problems is that cyclists seem to be a parsimonious lot at best. I’m probably near to that extreme myself, because I’ll always hunt down the lowest price for whatever it is I want and sometimes even then try to argue for a better deal. The proof that I’m far from alone is there for all to see in the success of Wiggle, Chain Reaction et al, and the huge market for so-called “grey” goods that is Ebay.

Another problem, at the industry level this time and I don’t think for a minute that cycling is alone on this one, is the sheer number of middle-men who sit between the manufacturer and the consumer, all taking their cut yet contributing little of value. In my ideal world I’d deal direct with the manufacturers and cut out the importers, distributors, retailers and their cohorts. Even the various members of the UK’s in-vogue Far East-fuelled cottage industry of frame “builders” have one more link in the chain than is strictly required – why don’t we, the consumers, buy direct from the factory in Taiwan? After all, that’s all they’re doing!

Let’s do some maths. My new XT/F519/DT Comp wheelset would have cost £120 from Chain Reaction, which is the cheapest for which you can buy it new from a shop. Incredibly this is £25, or 17%, less than Chain Reaction will ask were you to buy the parts individually, which gives a pretty strong clue as to the likelihood of anyone being able to make a living through building wheels. This is a paradox: building wheels is essentially about adding value, i.e. taking a bunch of items that are useless individually and turning them into something useful, yet Chain Reaction have implicitly put a negative value of £25 on the wheels that they build, which, if you’ll forgive the sarcasm, is about the only thing they did get right about my Hope/XC717 wheels! I don’t understand their pricing structure at all because intuitively it would make more sense to charge the £120 for the individual components as well, with a tempting option to have them built into wheels free of charge. The benefits of this would be two-fold: more people would buy the individual components in order to build the wheels themselves, which would increase revenue; the shop would not have to build so many wheels themselves, which would cut costs; everyone’s a winner!

On a commercial basis I doubt that more than two hours in total is spent on each pair of wheels from picking the components off the shelves, through the building process to packing the whole lot up and shipping it out. Assuming an 8 hour working day, 5 days a week for 46 weeks of the year (after holidays), that equates to a maximum potential revenue of £110,400 for one full-time wheel builder for an entire year!

Sounds impressive, but we’ve not factored in any costs yet. For starters, the VAT man will want 17.5% of that. It’s reasonable to assume that an XT/Mavic/DT build is fair approximation of the average custom built wheelset, and I estimate that about 50% what’s left will be swallowed up by the wholesale price of the components. This will be the single largest cost, and it’s out of this huge dollop of cash that the importers & distributors gouge their share. I wonder how much of this actually makes its way back to the manufacturer? I suspect that the middle-men make the best living out of anyone in the supply chain and yet they create nothing!

We also need to deduct postage. A properly packed pair of wheels would cost a member of the public at least £10 to post, but let’s assume that a business could negotiate a 50% discount on this – so there goes £4,600. Credit card, banking and invoicing costs could wipe away 5% of the total revenue. Then there’s the cost of premises, both for working in and for storing stock – let’s factor in £500 per month for that, so another £6,000 is chipped away.

So what are we left with out of the initial £110,400? It’s been eroded to just under £29,500, which is not such an impressive figure. This assumes that you can build a pair of wheels to a saleable standard in two hours flat (no amateur will get to within double this) and spend every working hour doing so. But in fact you’ll have to spend a significant amount of time keeping accounts, paying and preparing invoices, sourcing and ordering stock, packing up and posting the wheels, dealing with customers, getting advertising space (assuming that you don’t have mates in the cycling press who’ll do regular “reviews” for free)… in fact a whole lot of stuff that prevents you from doing the one thing that brings in the revenue! I’ve not factored in any costs, in terms of time or money, for sundries such as computers, a website, stationery, telephones… The list is endless, but the available cash has gone, and then some.

Quite apart from the mounting costs that have remorselessly worn away at that initially impressive number, there’s the very real chance that you’ll be bored witless from the hours of drudgery, day after day, performing the same monotonous physical task. Your fingers will hurt, your back will ache and you’ll begin to resemble and probably also talk like Gollum from “Lord of the Rings”. You’ll never look at a wheel, or even a bike, in the same way again! Worse than this, you’ll have the loathsome task of dealing with the general cycling public who, when the mood takes them, can be a nit-picking, chippy bunch of load-mouthed perfectionists.

And finally, there is of course the ultimate risk in that you’re a one-trick pony who is therefore extraordinarily vulnerable to changes to the industry in general, but most of all to a bigger, more efficient competitor who may suddenly decide to compete on price and price alone.

I started this post not knowing precisely where it would end up, but the writing’s been on the wall for the last few paragraphs, and Mr Musson himself has chipped in underneath yesterday’s entry with the coup-de-grace. Ironically, Chain Reaction have got it about right in knocking 17% off the total retail price of the components when you get them build you a pair of wheels, because that’s not far off what you can expect to lose if you try to compete with them on a commercial basis. And you are going to lose; you’ll make no money whatsoever, in fact you’ll probably end up bankrupt. It’s a mug’s game, and the real wonder of it is that anyone at all bothers going it alone in the bike business, that is unless they’re attempting to profit from other buggers’ efforts!

20 Wheel Building Dos & Don’ts

Well, twenty four actually, but I’ve paired some up:

1. DO begin with the finished article in mind;
2. DO be a competent amateur bicycle mechanic in the first place;
3. DO read all that you can, at least twice;
4. DON’T listen to well-intentioned idiots on web forums;
5. DO make up your own mind about the various wheel building myths;
6. DON’T get distracted by non-standard wheel configurations to start with;
7. DO know the real value of components;
8. DON’T confuse cost with quality, nor cheapness with value;
9. DON’T take the reviews in the cycling press at face value;
10. DO decide what you are prepared to pay for each part and stick to it rigidly;
11. DO haggle, directly but politely, but DON’T be afraid to walk away;
12. DO be prepared to miss out on a deal, there will be another along soon;
13. DON’T pay over the odds just because a required item is scarce;
14. DO search out discontinued products that have simply been rebranded;
15. DO be prepared to sell your old wheels to offset against the cost of the new;
16. DO use the proper tools and work in a quiet place, free from distractions;
17. DO have a drink, but DON’T get sloshed;
18. DON’T try to finish a wheel in one sitting: DO know when to walk away;
19. DON’T expect to get it 100% right first time and DO be prepared to retrace several steps when you make a mistake (and you probably will!);
20. DO expect to ultimately finish up with better wheels at a lower price than you will get almost anywhere else!

A final word, courtesy of Her Majesty’s SAS: “Proper Planning & Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance”!

Exploding Myths!

There are lots of myths surrounding wheels and their building. I’ll try to explode as many as I can here!

MYTH: Black spokes are more prone to breaking.
TRUTH: Cheap black spokes are prone to breaking, but no more so than cheap silver spokes. Limited budgets get spent on presentation (i.e. the black coating) first, substance last. Quality spokes last for ages, irrespective of hue.

MYTH: Building wheels is some kind of black art.
TRUTH: Painting with oils is an art. Carpentry is an art. Building wheels is a technical discipline involving a relatively straight-forward mechanical process, whereby a collection of ready-made components are assembled according to a set of instructions, the results of which are measurable. Building flat pack furniture is not an art, and neither therefore is building wheels.

MYTH: Competition between the mail order wheel builders has driven prices down to a point where it’s not worth building your own wheels.
TRUTH: This is not so clear-cut, because it depends upon precisely what you are after. My pair of wheel builds can certainly be achieved far cheaper by sourcing the components and putting them together yourself, as I have shown. Something more akin to my DMR Revolver/DT EX 5.1d wheels is a different matter, because some of the components are not widely available or are new to market, so there are little or no discounts to be had.

MYTH: Reviews in the cycling press give a good indication as to who the best wheel building shops are.
TRUTH: Think of magazine reviews more as an extension of the retailers’ (read “advertisers’”) marketing strategy than an objective evaluation of the product. Quite often the wheels will have been ridden for no more than a day at most before scoring 9 out of 10 and are rarely tested against their direct competitors.

MYTH: The mail order wheel builders are all pretty similar, just go with the cheapest.
TRUTH: To some extent it’s a lottery whomever you use, but Merlin Cycles are probably the most consistent.

MYTH: The quality of the hubs/rims/spokes/nipples (delete as applicable, depending upon to whom you listen!) is of the utmost importance.
TRUTH: My opinion only, but the quality of all the components is equally important.

MYTH: Spokes get broken through hard riding.
TRUTH: The spokes are the strongest, most fatigue resistant part of a wheel. Spokes break because the wheel was either poorly made, poorly maintained or has been damaged in some way. Sometimes all three!

MYTH: Plain gauge spokes build a stronger wheel.
TRUTH: This perpetuates because some people can’t get their thick heads around the fact that a thicker spoke doesn’t necessarily make a stronger wheel. Firstly, the spokes aren’t the weak point in a correctly built wheel, the rim eyelets and hub flanges are. Secondly, spokes don’t break due to weakness; they usually break due to fatigue. Only if the spoke is thicker in the right area (usually the elbow) does this improve its fatigue life and plain gauge spokes are no thicker in this area than butted spokes. Plain gauge and double butted spokes build equally strong wheels, but those using the former will be heavier and cheaper. So the next time you see wheels advertised as “built with plain gauge spokes for strength”, tell the seller that they’re a berk!

MYTH: Double butted spokes build a stronger wheel.
TRUTH: This one always makes me laugh, as though removing material from a component can make it stronger! The explanation behind it is that when under load butted spokes will stretch a tiny bit more than plain gauge spokes and therefore some people claim, not without some justification, that this tiny bit of extra flex is enough to dissipate shocks more evenly across the whole structure thus improving fatigue life but NOT ultimate strength.

MYTH: You can’t re-use old spokes on a new wheel.
TRUTH: You can re-use spokes over and over again, providing that the wheels that they have previously been a part of have been properly built & stressed and that the spokes are the correct length and not damaged in any way. You should use new nipples each time though.

MYTH: You can re-use an old rim on a new wheel
TRUTH: Sometimes you can, but I wouldn’t. Rims are disposable items, especially if they’ve been used with rim brakes. Rims with dings or other damage should be discarded.

MYTH: You can get good advice on web forums.
TRUTH: You can certainly get a lot of advice, but not much of it is of any use except for passing the time of day. However, sometimes you get pointed towards a resource from which you might actually learn something worthwhile.

MYTH: A wheel can collapse if you don’t build/true it properly, so it’s best to take it to a pro.
OR: If you go out for a walk this lunchtime you might get hit by a car while crossing the road, so it’s best stay at your desk and post nonsense on internet forums.
TRUTH: If a wheel is in danger of collapsing during normal use then it will be so obviously out of shape that only a fool would even consider riding it. So no, it won’t collapse. Truing a wheel, especially, is very simple and a good guide can be found on Park Tool’s website.

MYTH: Wheel builders are beardy-wierdy train-spotterish loners.
TRUTH: I don’t have a beard!

If you can think of any other myths (lets try to keep it wheel-relevant), feel free to explode them hereunder!

Future Wheel Projects

At the risk of getting ahead of myself – I’ve not even begun the XT/Sun wheels yet – I can’t help but look to the future to see what else I could turn my hand to! While it would be somewhat premature to declare myself a master wheel builder, I’ve no qualms about mumbling under my breath similar claims about truing and balancing pre-existing wheels. Therefore my next project will be to sort out the appalling job that Chain Reaction Cycles did on building my Hope XC/Mavic XC717 Disc/DT Swiss Revolution wheelset for my S-Works M5 hardtail.

In no way am I exaggerating when I say that these wheels were out of true before they even left the box. This was compounded by the fact that the spokes had not been stress-relieved (they pinged relentlessly) and the spoke tension was all over the shop. With hindsight I should have sent them straight back. Chain Reaction subsequently built my hardcore DMR Revolver/DT Swiss EX 5.1d/DT Swiss Competition wheelset, the only reason being that they were the only shop at that time to stock DT’s new all-mountain rim, which I specifically wanted. I included in this order a reference to their previous effort and a thinly-veiled threat to send the new pair back by return if they arrived in anything less than perfect condition. Unsurprisingly, these are fine!

Notwithstanding the state they arrived in, half an hour’s work with the spoke key brought the XC/XC717 wheels into some kind of order and they’ve been okay since, including coming through some rough treatment unscathed whilst in the North York Moors. However with the spoke tension the way it is they won’t last long before either the spokes start to break or the rims start to crack around the eyelets, so more remedial work is necessary. The DT Revolution spokes make it a slightly fiddly job because they twist far more under load from the spoke key than do the thicker Competition variety, which is one possible reason (but no excuse) for Chain Reaction’s shoddy work.

My second future project is slightly longer term because I’ve only ever read about it or seen pictures in magazines or on websites. I’m thinking of a single speed-specific rear wheel, possibly with a flip/flop hub. I don’t yet fully understand all the implications of such a wheel, but I have the germ of an idea: that I could convert the Inbred into a “double speed”. It would have two chain rings and two sprockets (one on each side of the hub), giving two different ratios but the same chain length, e.g. 34/16 and 33/17: one for getting to the trailhead; the other for riding off road. If the sum of the number of teeth on each ring/sprocket combination is equal then in theory the required chain length should be the same, which saves messing about adjusting the loathsome chain tugs.

One of the problems of such a set-up is sourcing a suitable hub: after all, I’ve never even seen one in the flesh so they can hardly be called commonplace. Even though they’re much simpler than a 9 speed freehub, I suspect that they’re sold for wallet-emptying amounts of money by ferret-faced little men via their internet-based niche bike shops, the sort of single-interest types who wear cycling like a badge of honour and who really need to mix with a broader cross section of society. The rest of us owe them a living, you know! I might ask around on www.singletrackworld.com as there’s bound to be a fawning little clique or two that frequent the forum.

Anyway, I want a black hub with 135mm OLN, 10mm quick-release spindle and proper, well-sealed bearings. Surly do something with a solid non-QR spindle that I could probably change and “angular contact bearings”, whatever the hell they are, but at around £60 it seems vastly overpriced for something that I’d want to dismantle before even using. On-one do a quick-release single-sided single speed hub for £30, but given my experience of the majority of the other products that I’ve tried with their name on it there’s a better than evens chance of it being crap, so that’s definitely off the list (although I’ll concede that the Inbred stem is very good – still reading, Brant?). This idea will stay on the back burner for a while yet!

For the last wheel-based project that I can think of for now, I’m coming to the conclusion that the best thing to do with my very first wheel - a black Hope XC hub, silver Mavic X221 rim and silver DT Swiss Competition spokes - will be to dismantle it and sell the parts individually. It’s hardly been used, being something that I built for the sake of it rather than for any intended purpose, and the only reason I’ve held on to it until now is that appearance-wise it matches the Deore/X221 wheels on Mrs P’s Airborne Liberator. It was this wheel that was the reason for buying the black Hope XC rear hub from Ebay, as at the same time I had my eye on a very cheap X221 rim and these would have combined to make a matching rear to go with the existing front. I lost out on the rim however, which left me stranded with that Hope hub.

The problem with the XC/X221 combo is that it mates high end with low end components, and so limits the appeal of the finished article to any potential buyers. It’s likely that the whole wheel will sell for no more than the hub on its own, hence the decision to split it, sell the hub and rim separately and keep the spokes for a future build. Also I’ve never unlaced a wheel before and that in itself is likely to be a learning experience.

Alternatives to 32h Three-Cross Spoking

There’s a good reason why the vast majority of wheels are built with 32 spokes crossed three times: quite simply, it works. If you want something different then you need a damn good reason for it! Why might that be?

The total number of spokes is always a number divisible by four, because these spokes are separated into four groups: leading & trailing, left & right. Either side of 32 spokes, this gives us 28 and 36. It’s a well established fact that the ultimate strength of a wheel is not determined by the yield point of the spokes, but by that of the rim eyelets and hub flange. I picked a 36 spoke configuration for my utility wheelset not because the extra four spokes give four spokes-worth, or 12.5%, of extra strength to the wheel but because they spread the loads experienced by the wheel over four extra points each on the hub and rim, providing a more even loading. The exact opposite is true of a 28 spoke wheel. 36 spokes is the next most popular configuration after 32, but it’s still not all that common. 28 spoke wheels are becoming increasingly rare since Mavic appear to have stopped producing 28 hole rims for the aftermarket.

A very distant second to 3X in terms of popularity is radial spoking, where the spokes run from the hub to the rim at right angles to the rim without crossing each other at all (also called zero cross). Radial spoking is only suitable when there is no force transmitted by the spokes from hub to rim (or vice versa) by a freehub or disc brake. It’s a stupid idea, no hub manufacturer (that I know of) warranties their products for use with such a pattern, so don’t use it. Its supposed advantages are that you need shorter spokes which saves a tiny amount of weight, and that it looks “cool”. Its disadvantages are several: uneven spoke tension means the nipples are more likely to work loose; it poses enormous loads on the hub flanges which can (and will) subsequently fail; the fact that the spokes aren’t butting up against each other means there’s greatly reduced lateral stiffness in the wheel; you can’t use radial spoking with disc brakes, nor on the drive side of a rear wheel. Some folk mix three cross spoking on one side of the wheel with radial on another (e.g. drive vs. non-drive side on a rear wheel), but many of the same objections apply. Do yourself a favour and leave radial spoking to the city ponces on their Cannondales!

One cross spoking is not that far removed from radial spoking, so the same objections apply here too, but two cross is a little different mainly because most hub manufacturers do actually warranty their hubs for use with such a pattern. Nevertheless, the only reason I can think for actually using 2X is because for some reason you are unable to source the required spoke lengths for a 3X wheel and can’t afford to wait.

Last up of the conventional patterns is four cross spoking. You need at least 36 spokes before this becomes an option otherwise the spokes will foul their neighbours’ spoke heads on the hub flange, but it will build an extra-strong wheel. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the physics of tangential spoking will understand why a wheel will be stronger if the spokes leave the hub flange at an angle as close to 90 degrees as possible, and 4X achieves this. I considered using 4X lacing on my utility wheels, but a combination of its complexity, my relative inexperience and the fact that I’ve never seriously damaged a 3X wheel put me off, and perhaps just as well: I foresee the process of lacing a 4X wheel being particularly fraught, but that may be unfounded so don’t let me put you off trying!

The standard X-cross patterns all have one thing in common which makes them relatively simple for the amateur wheel mechanic to build, this being that all the spokes on each side of the wheel are the same length. But there are other options for the brave! Damon Rinard’s website contains links which show some particularly fancy spoking patterns. The most visually striking is probably the “Three Leading, Three Trailing” pattern, but I have reservations about its ultimate strength due to apparent concentrations of stresses on the hub flanges and rims. Another is the “Crows Foot”, but as this uses partial radial spoking I’d argue that it’s unsuitable for MTB disc brake wheels.

Other oddities are the twisting together of spokes (butterfly spoking) and tying & soldering. Butterfly spoking strikes me as extremely difficult to build and I can also see it subjecting the spokes to stresses for which they simply haven’t been designed, both at the twist itself and also due to the resulting angle that the spokes enter the rim. Tying & soldering is an old technique that has recently found some favour again, as www.on-one.co.uk will now build you tied & soldered wheels for an extra £50 per pair. However, given the degree of precision and quality of workmanship required I can’t see why you’d want to get them from a company renowned for neither. Opinion is divided as to whether tying & soldering has any benefit at all: Schraner says it does (but what does he know?!?), but in his book Jobst Brandt says it doesn’t. All I’ll say is I’ve never owned a tied & soldered wheel, and nothing I’ve ever seen or experienced has got me sitting here now thinking “Now if only that wheel had been tied & soldered…”

First Proper Ride

I’d been looking forward to this since the initial test ride, but a combination of little kiddies, socialising and sundry other inconveniences had made me put it off until the night before last. Finally I had the opportunity to get out into the hills for a proper long-distance shakedown ride and to put the new wheels up against the sort of stuff they’ll have to deal with on a regular basis from now on.

I’m an incurable fettler and am always trying new bits and slightly different set-ups, which means that I rarely ride a bike twice with the same configuration. This constant fiddling can sometimes make it difficult to ascertain exactly what difference each change makes to the way the bike rides, because sometimes I’ll have made several alterations between any two rides. This is compounded by having a garage of four bikes (not including Mrs P’s), which means that the gap between taking one of them out and then getting round to riding it again can sometimes be weeks. Even since the test ride I’d swapped the elastomers on the Inbred’s Koobi PRS saddle from hard to soft!

However, this alone is not enough to mask the change to the character of the bike caused by the new wheels. Although my backside appreciated the extra give in the saddle I still noticed an improvement in the stability of the bike, which I suspect is due to the wider F519 rims effectively plumping-up the tyres and giving the a wider stance. The WTB Mutano Raptors don’t offer a great deal of grip at the best of times, even at a portly 2.4”, but they seemed a little better than usual even with some damp patches still around following the weekend’s deluges.

After rattling down some singletrack at around 20mph or so for starters I checked the wheels: still perfect. Next up, a big out-of-the-saddle climb: no problems. Then a careful run around the local jump spot, not because I was nursing the wheels but because it was damp and those dodgy tyres would jump at any chance to deposit me in the undergrowth! We have history, those tyres and me, and both bike and rider wear the scars of previous directional disagreements. Not for much longer though, they’re off as soon as I get a moment to fit the truly enormous 2.5” Syncros FLTs that I’ve just picked up for a tenner apiece in the sales.

At the jump spot I finished up with a vein-bulging eye-popping climb out of the old gravel pit. At this point it’s worth bearing in mind that my Inbred is a fully rigid singlespeed with no suspension fork. Some might argue that this imposes additional strains on the wheels as there’s little shock absorption in the whole set-up, but I don’t agree: I think it certainly puts more strain on the rider, but seeing as the poor bugger can’t then ride as hard or fast as they could with a bit of bounce up front I’d say that the wheels actually get an easier life as a result. A singlespeed set-up, on the other hand, gives the rear wheel a harder time. Out of necessity singlespeeders tend to have stronger legs than the average rider, and this is certainly true of me. I have huge thigh muscles, a product of having played rugby and been a competitive skier between my teens and mid-twenties, and I can lift multiples of my already considerable 15st body mass in a gym. The force that I can put through the pedals is consequently pretty mighty and I’ve even managed to break a rear hub spindle while attempting to climb a particularly steep slope. Another comedy incident occurred in a similar scenario, when I was pushing so hard that when the chain snapped the resulting release of energy sent the bike shooting out from under me. It finished several feet away yet I’d been almost stationary at the time! I tell these tales not out of a need for self-aggrandisement but in an attempt to illustrate the huge forces involved in honking a singlespeed up a steep slope. These forces are all transmitted from the cranks, via the chain, to the hub of the rear wheel and then, crucially, from the hub via the spokes to the rim, tyre and finally the ground. Another good reason for spreading these forces over 36 spokes instead of 32, I’m sure you’ll agree! I chose the climb out of the gravel pit deliberately because it replicates these stresses: it’s a tough enough climb with a 9 speed cassette and 22t granny ring at your disposal, let alone on a 32/16 singlespeed. In fact, I’d only ever cleaned the climb once before using the Inbred. The wheels coped perfectly!

Obviously I was pretty stoked by all of this, and with no need from now on to periodically check the wheels I headed out on a long loop containing more of the same and rode as I would on any other day. A quick check on the wheels at the end of the ride, an easy 13 miler, showed that they’d not budged even a fraction of a millimetre out of true. Their final test will be to fit them to my DMR Switchback, a heavily-built aggro-XC hardtail with a 120mm fork, and take them out for a real kicking (this is relative, I’m 100% XC jeyboy at heart!) but this will first involve swapping over 6-bolt disc rotors and all that kind of fuss so it can wait for now. I am a happy boy!

Old Wheels In Need of a Home!

My intention has always been to sell the old wheels that my two new pairs will be replacing. Quite apart from it being a little difficult to justify, even to myself, the temptation to keep the old ones “just in case…”, Mrs P only agreed to let me fork out the necessary cash on the components for the new wheels on the strict proviso that the proceeds of the sale of the old wheels would subsequently be offset against this!

The wheels that my new utility XT/F519 wheelset is replacing are not a matching pair but look pretty much the same. Both consist of similar high quality components and have been well built by decent bike shops, both of whom I’m happy to recommend to anyone.

The front, a silver 32h Hope XC laced to a black Mavic X517 rim with silver DT Swiss Competition spokes, is in as good a condition as the day it was built by Bike Plus (part of the Geoff Butler group in South Croydon): a testament to the quality of the build and also, I fear, to my namby-pamby riding style!

The rear, a silver 32h Hope Mono laced to a black Mavic X517 rim with silver DT Swiss Competition spokes and built by Merlin Cycles, is visually very similar but does not have a disc mount, and one of the freehub bearings has developed a slight notch despite being much younger than the front hub. This is why I don’t like cartridge bearings. If this were a Shimano hub with cup-and-cone bearings it would take 15 minutes to strip, clean, grease & reassemble and would then run as good as new for no cost. Instead this one requires a new bearing costing £10 and an assault with a hammer. Despite the minor work required on the rear hub I reckon it’s possible to gross around £100 by selling the Inbred’s old wheels separately on Ebay: that’s more than the sum of the utility wheels’ components!

The wheels that will be replaced by the XT/Sun set, when I get around to building them, are a matching pair of black Shimano Deore M510 hubs laced to matching silver Mavic X221 rims using silver Alpina ACI double butted spokes and were also built by Merlin Cycles. They’ve hardly been used, mainly because Mrs P has spent most of the last two and a half years either pregnant or recovering from childbirth. The only excuse for replacing them is that they’re rim brake specific, but the new all-black wheels will also look better with her bike, which I guess is important too! Indications are that I’ll be able to get at least £50 gross for this pair.

I took advantage of a 10p listing day on Ebay to put up the Inbred’s old wheels and the surplus-to-requirements Hope XC rear hub at somewhat speculative prices with a Buy It Now option. I habitually do this with medium to high value components as it saves on listing fees and it’s surprising how many bites you end up getting. Lo and behold, the Hope hub goes quickly for a modest £6 net profit! This just goes to show that if you buy low, even without really knowing what you’ll do with a component, it’s always possible to get your money back if you subsequently decide to move it on and are prepared to hold out for a bit.

A couple of days later and the front Hope XC/X517 wheel has also gone, for £47 net of fees, giving me a current net position of £105 spent on the entire project with three wheels still to be sold. This is not including the cost of tools or any charge for the time I’ve spent sourcing components and painstakingly putting them all together, but then the object of the exercise was simply to build two pairs of high quality wheels, however long it took, so I think that this is a reasonable approach. Even when taking into account postage costs and Ebay’s exorbitant fees it seems likely that this whole exercise will be near enough a zero-sum transaction. It seems scarcely worth asking whether it’s been worth it up to now - of course it has - but Mrs P thinks so too and that’s what counts! ;-)

Test Ride!

Even though I now have two pristine-looking wheels it’s not simply a case of sticking them on the bike and riding off. This is mainly because this pair is replacing another on a pre-existing bike, and so the bike has to be stripped down first. Once the old wheels are stripped of their tyres, tubes, rim tapes, skewers, chain tugs, disc rotors, cassette & computer magnet, and having fixed a sneaky little thorn puncture that was just waiting there to be discovered, all this kit has to be put onto the new pair. Then the wheels need to be refitted to the bike and the brakes have to be fettled: disc hubs have differing disc offsets, so the calliper needs adjusting; the new rims are wider and the braking surface is a little deeper than the old rims, so V-brake pads need repositioning. Then we’re ready to rock!

When you have a new wheel that you’re riding for the first time it’s not unusual to hear a few pings and clicks from the spokes as it turns its first few revolutions carrying the rider’s weight. This is caused by the unwinding of any residual twisting in the spokes and is the sound of your nice new wheel going out of true. The root cause is a combination of the wheel not having been correctly stress-relieved by the builder, and of not backing the nipples off by 1/8th of a turn during the final tensioning phase. In his book Schraner would have you believe that this is normal and to be expected (Musson says the exact opposite), which only serves to reinforce my growing suspicion that he’s a fraud. It’s a sign of a less than perfect job and there’s absolutely no excuse for it.

How does it feel on that first ride, using wheels that you’ve built yourself? Exciting? Nerve wracking? It’s certainly not like any normal ride, that’s for sure! With the two wheels I built a year or two ago I was very tentative over the first few rides, especially with the front wheel as the potential consequences of a failure here at any meaningful speed are horrendous (and it might scratch the paintwork!). This was partly because these were my first efforts, but also because deep down I knew that I didn’t know everything I needed to: there was uncertainty, and this always made me hold a little back whenever I’ve ridden on those wheels up to now.

Not so here. Of course, I’d be stark staring mad to head out into the hills on a 30 mile epic or straight down to the local jump spot for a good thrashing, but with these new wheels I have the feeling of having got it all pretty much spot-on, albeit via a rather circuitous route. After all, if there was something wrong with them I should be able to tell via the trueness, dish or spoke tension, but these indicators are all fine. A short evaluation ride involving a bit of gentle on and off road riding with some moderate braking and accelerating is the order of the day, all the while listening out for the tell-tale signs of miscreant spokes illicitly relieving themselves of any pent-up stress. I hear nothing. The bike rides superbly, somehow far better than it seemed to before. Am I imagining it, or is this the extra width in the rims giving a bit of extra support to the big 2.4” tyres (or have I just pumped the tyres up too hard?)? Still no pinging from the spokes; this is encouraging. After ten minutes or so of varied riding I stop and check the trueness of the wheels: still as good as the moment they left the jig. This is very encouraging indeed! I celebrate by downing a well-earned pint and buying a pair of massive 2.5” tyres for £20 in the sales. Now it’s time for a proper ride!

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!!

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!

Lacing the First Wheel

Finally it’s time to start building! It’s an exciting moment, but this is no time to get all worked up. Wait until the kids are in bed then set your tools out, read the relevant parts of the instructions thoroughly, twice, pour a glass of decent red wine, take a deep breath and relax. This is going to take some time.

The guide books all describe the building of a rear wheel with 32 spokes laced three-cross, which is what I’d planned to start with, but the tardy arrival of the Sun rims has put paid to that because I’m too impatient to wait any longer before getting stuck in. So the XT rear hub and F519 rim with 36 black spokes it’ll have to be, and I’ll be using Gerd Schraner’s lacing method. At this point it’s a huge advantage if you have to hand an existing similar or, preferably, identical wheel to which you can refer in order to compare your progress with what you already know to be correct.

All the guides start in the same place – right hand drive side with a leading (or pushing) spoke – but after this they start to diverge. Schraner’s method involves lacing the entire drive side first, then starting on the non-drive side. It quickly becomes apparent that this is fine up to the point where you need to push the inside non-drive side spokes through the hub. If you push them straight through they entangle with the already laced drive side spokes, and to avoid this happening you have to bend the spoke by such an amount that you risk putting a kink in it! I never had this problem when I built my first wheels using Sheldon Brown’s method, and for the life of me I can’t fathom why Schraner would suggest this. It just doesn’t work!

Anyhow, I soldier on and eventually get all the spokes in and laced. A few have a pronounced curve to them but thankfully no kinks. Schraner’s book gets thrown into a corner of the room and with a big gulp of wine I revert sheepishly to Musson, ashamed that I ever strayed from his path of righteousness. Using a nipple driver for the first time, I take up the slack in the spokes by spinning up all the drive side nipples until the tool disengages, and then wind up the non-drive side nipples until the spoke threads are just hidden. The new tool is an instant hit, just like Musson said it would be. Now it’s starting to look like a proper wheel and a quick check reveals that it’s surprisingly true and round. This has taken about an hour and half, so now’s a good time to walk away and take a break!

The Bits Arrive, One By One

When you buy from the likes of Ebay and the classified ads pages of web forums you can never be 100% sure that the goods will actually turn up and that you won’t have wasted your money. Not even when you’ve actually got the item in your hands are you safe, for its web-based description and accompanying photo may not have been entirely representative of its actual state. Fortunately bad things happen rarely and even then they can usually be sorted out amicably with the seller, but you should know the risks up front can have no complaints if it all goes legs-up!

Not much trouble with my little collection of bits though. Both the F519 rims and all the hubs arrive in good time, as do the Teutonic spokes and their oversize nipples (no sniggering at the back!). It turns out that one of the F519s is drilled for a Presta valve, the other for a Schraeder valve, which is a little annoying but I think I might be able to live with that. I don’t plan to drill out the Presta rim as I’d done in the past with an X517 rim (no, not the one that cracked!). Quite apart from potentially weakening the rim with my half-arsed attempts at drilling, it causes an enormous amount of swarf (metal filings) that is almost impossible to eradicate completely and so risks causing future punctures.

Then there’s the Sun rims, or rather the lack thereof. After waiting eight days since I sent the PayPal payment I’ve e-mailed the seller and asked when I might expect to see them. He replies that he’s not yet posted them which, to be perfectly honest, makes me really f***ing cross. No doubt he’d be squealing like a stuck pig if I’d not paid him after a similar length of time, so I don’t see why I should feel any different with the roles reversed, especially as he’s not even had the courtesy to let me know without first being prompted. I point this out, politely but firmly, but he’s non-plussed to the point of being sullen. The rims finally turn up after a further week. I’m tempted to name-and-shame right here, but you already know enough to be able to figure out for yourselves who he is, both on Ebay and STW, without me having to do that! Of course, if I leave him the feedback he deserves on Ebay I should expect some kind of vindictive response-in-kind, so I won’t bother.

Putting the delivery palaver aside as the trivial matter that it is, my biggest issue with the Sun CR18 rims is their sheer lack of quality. I’ve said in earlier posts that I thought they might be the equivalent of Mavic’s XM317, but this is quite clearly not the case. Where the Mavic rim’s finish is shiny and bright, the Sun’s is dull. The Mavic has a quality milled braking surface, whereas the Sun has a rough brushed finish, which looks what it is: cheap. The Mavic weighs in at 440g; the Sun is 480g, 10% heavier. The Mavic has a deeper and therefore stiffer cross section; whereas the Sun’s shallow profile makes any over-long spokes a real puncture worry. I’m not impressed. If it wasn’t for the fact that the spokes are already on order I’d be looking elsewhere for alternatives and re-selling these. As it is I’ll probably stick with them, but the likelihood of me ever buying Sun rims in the future is very small indeed.

Tooling Up

While my new components are wading through the treacle of the UK’s postal system, it’s time to think about what tools I’m going to need. The only tool that you absolutely cannot do without when building a wheel is a good quality spoke wrench. Anything else can be made or bodged for free if you’ve got the time and the inclination. I don’t have the latter and I value good quality tools well above their actual cost simply because they invariably make the work easier, produce a better end result and can be a pleasure to use, so I buy what I want.

My spoke wrench is a red Buddy Spokey Pro (£5), a classic piece of design in that it mates form, function and value so perfectly that I doubt it can ever be bettered. The Pro version has a doubled nipple engagement, which effectively halves the load on the soft material of the nipple by spreading it over double the area, thus reducing the likelihood of causing damage during final tensioning. I’ve also got a Park Triple Spoke Key SW-7 (£7) which, as the name subtly suggests, also fits US and Japanese nipple sizes but I’ve never actually come across either of these.

I’ve only ever built wheels using a purpose-built jig. Mine is a very basic Minoura Wheel Building Jig T-817 (£20), which is compact and folds away, but is a bit agricultural. Since I bought this it’s been superceded by a new version which I understand is a good deal better. Minoura also used to make a jig called the Workman Pro, which was far superior but still good value and is what I now wish I’d bought instead. My biggest grumble about the jig is that it’s a monster faff to get the wheels in and out of it because the jig’s drop-outs are too close together. You have to force them apart with one hand while dropping the wheel in with the other. Also it’s in-built means of checking radial and lateral trueness lack true fine tuning ability, but it’s still better than the alternative, which is to use the bike frame as a makeshift jig. Bikes are bulky, filthy beasts and far from ideal for working with on the kitchen table!

The easiest tool to make yourself for free is a dishing gauge, which makes my Minoura Wheel Dishing Gauge FCG310 (£15) look like poor value. It works well enough though, even if it lacks any form of calibration. This means you have to obtain the correct dish by eye, but that’s not too difficult.

The only tool that I’ve bought specifically for this project is a Bicycle Research Nipple Driver (£15), which is little more than a bent screwdriver with a pointy end and loose handle. In his Wheelpro book, Roger Musson is so unequivocal about the importance of using one of these (he also shows you how to make one) that I’d feel like a naughty, disobedient schoolboy if I didn’t get one!

Other bits and bobs, mostly at Musson’s behest, are some regular lubricating oil, a rag, some cotton buds and my trusty magnetic parts dish. This last item is a god-send and anyone who ever does their own spanner work should have one. There are loads on Ebay from about £5 upwards.

Lastly I’ve got my two wheel building guides, the Wheelpro book “A Practical Guide to Wheel Building” (£5) and “The Art of Wheel Building” by Gerd Schraner (£10), which brings the total cost of my wheel building toolbox to £87. This could reasonably be cut to £30 or so if you just went with the Spokey, jig and Wheelpro book, and made the dishing tool and nipple driver yourself.

Going Shopping… part 2

The Sun CR18 rims from the STW classifieds have reappeared, this time on Ebay and for a more reasonable £23, so I’m watching them. From what I can glean by looking over off the peg bikes in Cycle Surgery at lunchtime they appear to be the approximate equivalent of the Mavic XM317 so I’m definitely interested, in fact to hell with it: I’ll tee-up Auction Stealer to bid £25!

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to get the Shimano Deore XT 36h hubs from Wiggle and the morally challenging on-line retailer (whom I can’t bring myself to name) for £26 and £17 respectively. That all goes well, despite the consequent loss of the moral high ground!

Now, in addition to two pairs of XT hubs I’ve also gained two pairs of excellent XT quick release skewers. This means that I can sell the Deore skewers currently on the two bikes and offset the revenue against the cost of the new wheels. A “For Sale” ad in the STW classifieds nets £20 for the two pairs. This leaves me with that Hope XC rear hub from Ebay… what do they say about acting in haste? No takers on STW for that one, so I’ll just have to re-flog it on Ebay at a later date and hope I can get my wedge back.

I’ve won the Sun rims! As the sole bidder too, which is never a good sign as all too often it’s an indication that you’ve paid over the odds. Now I just need to check my spoke length calculations and order the spokes and nipples.

So, all components sourced and purchased, here’s the scores on the doors:

The utility wheelset (XT on F519) comes in at £88, against an equivalent cost of £120 if I bought a fully built pair of identical wheels from Chain Reaction, who are usually the cheapest of the on-line custom wheel builders. A saving of £32!

The budget wheelset (XT on Sun CR18) comes in at £63, against £105 from Chain Reaction (substituting XM317s for the CR18s). A saving of £42!

These figures include the sale of the Deore skewers and assume that I can sell the unwanted Hope XC for what I bought it for. So a total saving of £74, emphatic proof that it’s possible to build your own wheels for far less than the on-line builders, and I’m well chuffed!

Calculating Spoke Lengths

The formula for calculating spoke lengths is complicated and I’ve made no effort to try to understand it. Fortunately there are some excellent web-based resources that mean we don’t have to worry about it at all! The best known of these are listed in the “RESOURCES” post, and Damon Rinard’s site also includes the proof of the spoke calculation formula for the insomniacs out there.

Rinard’s free “Spocalc.xls” (full strength version) is an indispensable point of reference which you should definitely download. In addition to a multi-function spoke length calculator it includes fairly comprehensive hub and rim databases covering loads of different wheel types and sizes and it’s spreadsheet format means you can save your workings without having to re-key everything. It’ll be bad luck if your components aren’t listed, and from past experience I know that the stored dimensions and resulting calculations are sufficiently accurate that it can be trusted. It would however be good practice to check Spocalc’s default measurements against the actual components with which you will be building your wheels (my natural indolence means I haven’t bothered doing this!).

Another well-known resource is the DT Swiss spoke calculator, which we can access for free from the DT Swiss homepage. This also contains in-built hub and rim databases but is not as comprehensive as Spocalc. It’s easy to use but you can’t save your work, although I should think you can print it out. Interestingly, it generates different spoke lengths than Spocalc for the same components, but only a millimetre or so either way and this is not enough to have any significant effect on its own.

The other commonly used spoke calculator is on the Wheelpro website, but as this doesn’t include component databases I didn’t use it.

Primarily I use Spocalc, but I run my numbers through the DT Swiss tool by way of a check. On dished wheels (most rear wheels and any front wheel with a disc hub), the spokes required on the left and right of the wheel will be slightly different lengths. This is usually only by a couple of millimetres, but it’s enough to cause problems if you don’t get it right. Spokes that are too long will protrude from the nipple and may stick into the tube, rendering the wheel useless. Too short, and they’ll not be long enough to screw entirely into the nipples which might leave the spoke threads showing (unsightly) and could over stress the nipples causing them to fail (they’re only soft brass, after all).

An added problem is that you’ll often find that shops only sell spokes in even-numbered lengths, and even those that do all lengths may not have your exact requirements in stock. In such cases do you go long or short? I have no idea, and guess what? Yep, one of the spoke lengths I need is out of stock! The shorter in-stock length is only 1mm shorter than my calculated length where as the longer alternative is 2mm longer. So, worried about spoke ends protruding from my nipples (I mean, who wouldn’t be?!?!) I’m going to take a gamble here and round my spoke lengths down to the nearest length available from www.rose.de, and instead of buying 12mm nipples for these I’m going to get some 14mm versions. I’ve never seen nor read of this option before (Rose also sell 16mm nipples, which are intended for use in deep-section rims) and I hope it works! It’s nice to have got in a nipple gag too ;-)

Going Shopping… part 1

A trawl of Ebay has thrown up a few bits and bobs. I’m watching a pair of overpriced new M756 XT hubs which the seller won’t shift at the current asking price (I’ll make him an offer near the end of the auction), and there were a couple of Hope XC rear hubs, one of which, with 36 holes, I bought for £29 perhaps against my better judgement (see previous posts). That may turn out to be a mistake!

Also a couple of the online retailers have some good deals on the old M756 XT disc hubs (both 32h and 36h), one of which, whom I’ve refused to patronise since they tried to rip me off in the past, will be tough to beat. A moral dilemma there!

A couple of days later and I’ve won the Ebay XT hubs: brand new, with skewers, 32 holes! The seller had wanted £46 but you can get them from the shops for less than that, so I sent him a message pointing that out and offering the £35 – he accepted without haggling! Fantastic, those will form the basis for the budget wheelset, so now for some matching rims.

A positive response to a “Wanted” ad on the STW classifieds has yielded a brand new 36 hole Mavic F519, the predecessor to the XM719 and exactly what I’m after for the utility wheels! Matching it could be a problem, as the seller had a second one which was unfortunately damaged, but for £15 it’s a good start.

Also from the same ad I’ve been offered a pair of Sun CR18 rims, which is interesting but I don’t know anything about them, and the Sun Ringle website turns out to be pretty useless. The seller seems to know less about them than I do which is never a good sign. He wants £35 for them anyway, which is more than Bike Dock sell them for new, and my offer of £20 didn’t go down well so forget that!

Amazingly, there’s also rim on Ebay that appears to match the STW F519, so I’ve offered the seller £15 – he accepts! I’ve only been thinking about project for a week or so and if I take the hubs from the on-line retailers I’ve already found matching 36 hole hubs & rims in the exact specification I was after and at good prices too. I’m amazed how easy it’s been and reckon I’ve been more than a little fortunate. Time to work out the spoke lengths: for that I need some rim & hub dimensions and a spoke length calculator…

Spokey Dokey, then…

I can only name three spoke manufacturers: DT Swiss, Sapim and Alpina (often erroneously called ACI). Sapim are nearly impossible to find and Alpina are so cheap that I fear they may fall foul of Roger Musson’s sermon on spoke quality, so by default that just leaves me with DT Swiss! That’s no bad thing, I’ve had loads of wheels built with DT spokes and never had a single problem.

Without going into exotic options there's effectively a choice of three types of spokes: plain gauge 2mm, double butted 2/1.8/2mm and lightweight double butted 2/1.5/2mm, which correspond directly to DT's Champion, Competition and Revolution lines respectively (Sapim make similar distinctions between their lines, but I’m not familiar with the names). The double butting removes material from the centre of the spoke where it's not required, creating a lighter and marginally more flexible spoke, but one that is equally as strong as it's plain gauge relative and also more resistant to fatigue when correctly built into a wheel. The claims of some people that plain gauge spokes build a stronger wheel are plain wrong - they build a cheaper, heavier wheel that's more likely to experience spoke failure at the spoke elbows, and that's it. Others will claim that double butted spokes build a stronger wheel, which is equally fatuous. Since when did removing material from a component make it stronger? This sort of nonsense is usually enunciated by lay people unable to make the distinction between ultimate strength and lifespan (defined by the likelihood of fatigue failure).

But it’s not always good intentioned amateurs who make such mistakes. The myth that black spokes are somehow more prone to breaking was for years pedalled by www.stif.co.uk (amongst many others who should also have known better). Stif have won awards for the perceived quality of their discount wheel builds, quite incredibly given their proud, and 100% bonkers, boast that they only use silver spokes because they’ve “seen too many broken black spokes to be able to have any confidence in them”. What utter rot! Cheap spokes break, fact. Black spokes cost more to make, fact. Therefore it’s reasonable to suppose that cheap black spokes will have had proportionally less spent on their manufacture than silver ones, are therefore poorer quality and will consequently break more often. I’m convinced that this is the source of the black spoke myth. Quality spokes, black or silver, will always perform equally well; you’ll just pay a little bit extra for dusky ones. So for all these years, have Stif been subtly implying that they build their wheels using cheap spokes of dubious quality?

Lastly we come to the nipples! Small as they are, they hold the whole wheel together and so they are vital: not something to prat about with in some half-arsed attempt to save weight. They are usually made from brass or aluminium, and can come in a rainbow of colours. Brass is most suitable because it doesn’t corrode and screw threads cut into it are very smooth and easy to turn. Aluminium nipples are lighter but much softer and easy to damage with a spoke wrench, and are prone to corrosion. Different colours are available, but the nipple is the only part of a wheel which engages with a tool during the whole wheel building process, so coloured coatings are easily damaged and then look untidy. Lastly there are self-locking nipples, such as DT Swiss ProLock, which contain a thread-locking adhesive to prevent the nipples unscrewing during use, though quite why this would happen if the wheel were built properly to begin with I have no idea. Standard silver brass nipples are by far the best option!

As said before, I object to paying what are clearly rip-off prices for spokes in the UK, but on the face of it there doesn’t seem to be much choice in the matter. The cheapest UK retailers of DT’s Competition spokes are Bike Dock (at 35p per silver spoke & nipple) and Chain Reaction (at 56p per black spoke & nipple). Alternatively www.parker-international.co.uk sell Alpina spokes for the equivalent of 30p or 50p each respectively for silver or black. Buying from abroad is an option, but one would think that international P&P plus credit card charges are likely to negate any advantage found there.

Not so, as it turns out! www.rose.de, a German on-line merchant, are so much cheaper that even after a €12 P&P charge and Barclaycard’s pound of flesh I will still save stacks over the cheapest UK retailer. They sell in packs of 20, and for the quantity that I’m buying this works out at a net price per spoke of 24p or 36p respectively for silver or black DT Comps! So I’m going to buy 80 DT Swiss Competition spokes in silver and the same again in black (sizes to be confirmed), plus 160 standard brass nipples for a total consideration of €68.80 (about £40 in real money). By buying enough to build four wheels with plenty of spares I will dilute the P&P, but they’re still the cheapest option even if you buy enough to build just one pair, such is the extent to which the UK retailers are ripping us off!! It feels good to have stiffed the thieving gits.

Rims

Being able to hold a new unlaced rim in your hand is a rare thing. It’s surprising how incredibly stiff they are! Even the usual punishment meted out in the Royal Mail Parcels van doesn’t cause them to go out of shape. I’m after two matching pairs, both black and rim brake compatible, one tough but not excessively heavy, the other cheap but not low quality.

With the odd exception, most notably the fantastic but very spendy DT Swiss EX 5.1d rims on my hardcore XC bike, almost every wheel I’ve ever owned has had a Mavic rim and I’ve only once had a bad experience. This was with a 32h X517 rim that began to crack around the eyelets. In his book, Gerd Schraner speculates that this is due to using high pressure 26” road tyres on a rim designed for use with the lower pressure of MTB tyres. I think this is rubbish, and for two reasons. Firstly, I never used high pressure tyres on that wheel (a rear). Secondly, if you consider the forces at work when a tyre is inflated on the rim, it appears (and I could be wrong here) that the eyeleted surface of the rim is under compression, not tension. My hypothesis is that the cracking was almost certainly due to fatigue resulting from insufficient spoke tension, although the old X517 has a bit of a reputation for this sort of thing so perhaps there’s also an element of fault with the product.

So Mavic’s range is my benchmark. Alternatives on offer are Sun, DT Swiss, Fir, Alex, Bontrager, Rigida, Ritchey and a few others I know nothing about either, so if I’m to go for any of these then it’ll need to be a pretty stonking deal. As I’ve said, for the utility wheels I want something equivalent to Mavic’s XM719 rim, which is not too heavy at 460g when compared with the lightweight XC717 at 420g, yet has a moderately wide profile and is good and strong. The obvious alternative is the rim brake equivalent of the DTs mentioned above, the EX 5.1, but they’re a new model and still very scarce… and very costly. For the budget wheelset I’m looking at the equivalent of Mavic’s XM317 (same as the old X221 and not to be confused with the old X317).

Hubba Hubba!

Wheel hubs fascinate me. With the right hub it’s possible to get it running so sweetly that it’s practically frictionless and won’t need servicing for years, yet get something the teensiest bit dirty or out of line and it turns into very centre of cycling hell. There actually aren’t that many to choose from. From Shimano, only Deore XT are really an option for me because Deore can have rough bearings from new, are badly sealed and are weak (I seem to be able to break the freehubs at will). Deore LX hubs are scarce and I’ve no idea whether they are nearer to Deore or XT in terms of quality, and XTR are daft money.

Hope only really offer the XC or the new Pro II, both of which cost plenty and use cartridge bearings which I dislike. Cartridge bearings just don’t spin as effortlessly as cup-and-cone bearings and maintenance involves a hammer, a bin and expensive new bearings which you then hit with said hammer!?! I’ve used both Hope Mono & XC and Shimano Deore XT hubs over the past few years and it’s the XTs that have performed the best. Then there’s the cost - £80 for a new Hope XC rear hub, versus £27.50 for the equivalent Shimano Deore XT which also comes with an excellent quick release skewer. Knock the £7.50 off for the cost of the skewer and the Hope hub works out four times as expensive – overpriced and over-rated.

So it looks like Shimano Deore XT, in which case the choice is between the old 6 bolt IS hubs or the new Centrelock versions. Despite it being part of Shimano’s detestable grand plan to build obsolescence into all cycling components, Centrelock rotors make a great deal of sense. Trouble is, they’re new which means little prospect of discounts, and for compatibility reasons (i.e. all my rotors are 6-bolt!) I probably want to avoid them.

Sourcing Components

I’m conscious of doing this arse about face, in other words I’m buying the components before finishing reading the wheel building guides, which is not at all clever when it comes to the all important spoke length measurement. What could possibly go wrong?!?

As I’ve said, costs are to be kept to a minimum, but not at the expense of quality. For this reason I have a very strong preference for new or “as new” components and the best people to buy these from are those who have thought they might build their own wheels, bought the bits, then freaked out having read the guides, listened to ill-informed merchants of doom on web forums and seen the apparently irresistible offers from the mail order builders. As a result they’ve decided to cut their losses and sell, so it’s off to www.ebay.co.uk we go!

I think Ebay is a glorious product of the internet age, seamlessly mating the grey market with the ravenous consumerist appetite of the public at large. The vast majority of the stuff there is worthless counterfeit rubbish of course, but there are gems: it’s the source of some great bargains, but only if you know what you want, what it’s really worth… and how to haggle.

Many re-sellers of new or “as new” goods have an inflated and unrealistic opinion of what 2nd hand goods are worth, even if the item has never been out of the box. If you buy from a shop, in person on on-line, you have the full protection of consumer law, most notably guarantees & warranties. When you buy 2nd hand you get none of this, so why pay for it? Therefore if an Ebay seller is offering up an item for £25 that is available from a shop for the same amount, they’re not going to sell it. So what? That’s their problem isn’t it? No, it’s your opportunity – make them an offer. Whether they accept or not depends upon a number of things (the manner in which you make the offer, the amount you offer, the price at which you can buy it elsewhere, the timing…) but get it right and you can expect to save at least 25% over the lowest price offered by the on-line merchants.

If you’re going to use Ebay, something to consider also using is a sniping tool. These are bit fly-by-night, because you need to entrust someone you don’t know with your Ebay ID and password. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the people behind some of these tools are also those responsible for the hijacking of Ebay accounts and related illegal activity, so be wary and only use one that’s been recommended by someone you trust. I use Auction Stealer, which offers three free snipes per week and automatically places your bid 10-20 seconds before the auction ends. The point of this is that it leaves little or no time for another bidder to react to your bid, which means that if you win the auction, you could end up winning it for less.

The other main source of cycling bargains is the Classifieds forum on www.singletrackworld.com, although this is totally unregulated so care is required. The same type of seller as described above exists here too, but there are also a few who seem to either have little or no sense for what some items are truly worth, or some misplaced feeling of benevolence towards a disparate bunch of people they mistakenly perceive to be one happy family simply because they all ride a bike (I’m not kidding). Which ever it is, consequently they offer up good kit far cheaper than you’d find it even on Ebay.

Most of my components come from Ebay or STW, but it’s worth trawling through the online shops to see if there are any bargains. This would be time-consuming but for two valuable little gophers in the form of www.bikepimp.co.uk and www.shopping.outdoor-equipment-review.com. Either is good, but out of habit I tend to rely on Bike Pimp (which at the time of writing is down!).

Spokes are a special case and look like they’ll be a tough nut to crack. They’re not widely available to the public in the huge range of sizes required and when they can be found the prices are usually extortionate (up to £1 per spoke, anyone?). All the UK retailers are guilty of overpricing spokes including Chain Reaction, who have doubled the prices of their range of DT Swiss spokes since I last built a wheel. I feel backed into a bit of a corner here. I’m loathe to pay what are clearly rip-off prices, but what choice do I have? Maybe buy from abroad, but surely international P&P and the robbing sods at Barclaycard, who will as usual deliberately use a rate of exchange bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the current state of the currency markets, will negate any advantage found there? Finding a suitable resolution to the spoke problem is the crux to making this project cost effective.

Reading Material

You can’t read up enough on subjects about which you wish to learn and form your own views. The more varied and different perspectives you seek out, even if you know you’ll disagree with them from the outset, the more likely you are to come to the correct conclusion. My experience thus far with regard to wheel building books bears this out. It helps if, like me, you’re an opinionated git to start with!

I started with Sheldon Brown’s guide to wheel building, which you can find for free on his frankly extraordinary website (just go and spend some time looking around there!). I used this exclusively when building my first two wheels and found that it provides a good grounding on the basics. It enabled me to lace the wheels well enough, but I have found subsequently (through further reading rather than bitter experience, fortunately!) that it was woefully inadequate in its description of the latter stages of building, especially with regard to obtaining the correct spoke tension. It may have been updated subsequently, but I’ve not gone back to check and neither shall I. I would, however, recommend it as the first thing that a first-timer should read – just don’t make it the only thing!

Next up I came across Wheelpro, or to give him his real name, Roger Musson. He was for years the pro-wheel builder for the MBUK downhill MTB team (presumably before it became the sorry excuse of a “lifestyle” mag it is today) before giving it all up and writing all his know-how down in a book, “A Practical Guide to Wheel Building”, which we can buy on-line in handy .PDF format for $9 (or a little over £5 in real money). His use of English can be poor and consequently it doesn’t read that well at times, which very quickly begins to grate. But we’re not buying it for the delicacy of his Shakespearean prose and we’re not paying for a team of proof readers and publishers, so it’s churlish to complain about that too much! Most importantly, what it does contain is the best most practical step-by-step guide to building a wheel that I have yet read. There are also tips for making your own tools, for little hassle and practically no money. For £5 you can’t go wrong – buy it. I printed it out on double sided A4 and ring-bound it with a PVC cover so that it will last.

I’ve just finished reading “The Art of Wheel Building” by Gerd Schraner (also sold as DT Prosline guide to wheel building, but it’s the same thing). Schraner is a good deal older than Musson and his book provides an interesting counter point to Musson’s as his techniques clearly owe more to tradition rather than to what is strictly required when using components designed and made using modern manufacturing techniques and tolerances (Musson’s words!). For example, unless I’ve done something wrong (nothing is apparent!) Schraner’s sequence for the initial lacing of the spokes simply doesn’t work with MTB disc hubs, and I can’t see how it would work with any other sort of hub either. He laces all the spokes on one side before doing the inside spokes on the other, which means you can’t push this set through without bending them. However his method for tensioning a significantly dished wheel seems so obviously superior to Musson’s that this is what I’ll probably use first of all and see if it pays.

Musson emphasises that spoke quality is paramount, whereas Schraner says it’s all about the rims (but then he’s being paid to use DT spokes, so for him spoke quality is a given). I disagree with both of them. The quality of ALL the components is paramount. After all, it’s not as though you can simply swap out your hub at a later date if you find it’s not up to your requirements! The biggest issue I have with Schraner is that the book just rambles on, whereas Musson stops and emphasises the key points and describes very clearly what you should be doing. Furthermore, Musson provides a final step-by-step checklist (with page references) which is such a simple thing to insert, yet Schraner has omitted one completely. If you really want it then by all means buy Schraner’s book, but with the possible exception of his rear wheel tensioning method I think it’s crap. And make sure you shop around because prices vary enormously.

The other mainstream book I’ve come across, and perhaps the best known, is “The Bicycle Wheel” by Jobst Brandt, but I’ve not yet read it as it’s practically impossible to get hold of. If you’ve got a copy that you’d like to sell then get in touch!

What am I going to build?

When I built my first couple of wheels I made the mistake of building them "for the hell of it"; in other words I only had cost in mind when I selected the components, not the wheels’ intended purpose. The result was that I ended up with an expensive black Hope hub laced to a cheap silver Mavic X221 rim, and a heavy Shimano Deore XT M755 hub laced to a lightweight Mavic X517 rim. So I reckon that before you even start to look at components you should have a crystal clear idea of what the final wheel will be used for and how it will look.

I have two pairs of wheels in mind. The final specifications of each will depend upon what components I can find at what I consider to be the right price, but the following is the general idea. The rims and hubs will be black and both rim and disc brake compatible. At least one pair of wheels will use black spokes and these will be built using a 3-cross lacing pattern, chiefly because all my other wheels are 3X and it gives me a point of reference with which to compare my own work. Lots of spoke nipple options exist, but most if not all are pointless and I’ll be using standard silver brass nipples.

The first pair of wheels is to be a do-it-all pair of bomb-proof wheels, strength before light weight, able to handle tyres up to 2.5” wide, all in black. These will be fitted initially to my On One Inbred rigid singlespeed bike, but the intention is that they will be my “utility” wheel set for use with all future projects. The hubs will almost certainly be Shimano Deore XT, because I’ve used XT hubs before and found that they provide an unbeatable combination of low friction, low maintenance, low cost and light weight and they come with skewers (which I can sell to reduce the cost of the wheels). The rims will be Mavic XM719 or equivalent. I’ve not used these before, relying instead on Mavic’s lightweight X317, X517 or XC717 rims, but due to encroaching middle age and my predilection for large quantities of real ale and the quantity of food of dubious quality that such liquids encourage the consumption of, my consequent 15 stone mass dictates erring on the side of strength! Also the thin profile of the X517s that are currently fitted to the Inbred do not adequately support tyres much wider than 2.1” and the 2.4” WTB Mutano Raptors that I’m using do tend to squirm around a lot as a result. Whatever hubs and rims I get, they will definitely be mated via black DT Swiss Competition double butted spokes, probably 36 of them.

The second set of wheels will be simpler, cheaper and lighter, intended as they are for Mrs P’s Airborne Liberator. It gladdens my heart to say that she does not drink anything from a pint pot and tips the scales at around 9 stones, therefore I can use 32 spokes and a budget XC rim for this build. I’ll probably go with Shimano Deore XT hubs again if I can find some, but with these wheels I’m prepared to try something different by way of experimentation. DT Swiss Competition double butted spokes here too, but in silver this time to cut costs.