Dismantling My Very First Wheel

The very first wheel that I built consists of a used black Hope XC hub, new silver Mavic X221 rim and 32 silver DT Competition spokes and doesn’t have a matching rear, although it matches cosmetically the Deore/X221 pair on Mrs P’s Airborne. It’s an odd mixture of parts, from the high end Hope hub, to the middle-ranking DT spokes and the budget Mavic rim, and I personally feel that black hubs and silver rims look odd together.

I built this wheel about two years ago mainly because I wanted to see how difficult it would be and not because it was particularly needed. Nowt wrong with that, but as the wheel has never really had any intended purpose it has hardly been used as a consequence. I suspect that its parts are worth more than the whole and this, coupled with the certain knowledge that I’d need to carry out some remedial work on it to correct uneven spoke tension (nobody’s first build will ever be perfect), means that I’d probably be better off taking it apart and selling off the bits.

The process is very simple. Stick the wheel in the jig; loosen each spoke by one full turn using the Spokey; repeat for another revolution; and finally unwind the nipples from the now slack spokes using the nipple driver. This shouldn’t take any more than half an hour and indeed it doesn’t. An even quicker method would be to cut the spokes with bolt cutters but this has two major disadvantages: firstly, I’d lose the spokes, which in the UK are more expensive than Class A drugs: and secondly there’s always the risk that the nipples will shoot out of the rim like bullets from a gun, which is dangerous.

A moment’s pause for reflection on the demise of something created of my own hand? Yes, but only a moment, for the true purpose of this wheel has finally been revealed! Were it not for this first fumbled foray into the world of wheel building then the wheels that I’ve built recently would instead have been the forge upon which mistakes were made and knowledge & experience were gleaned. This first wheel, and its half-brother which has long since been sold on, soaked up these errors and omissions and has enabled me to build two robust, durable and - hopefully! - long-lived high quality wheel sets. Its work is done!