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!

Goodbye Flip/Flop, Hello Love/Hate

The trials and tribulations of my botched spoke length calculation for the second “budget” wheelset got me thinking about something that I’d noticed about the flip-flop wheel I’d bought from the STW classifieds. If I’d continued my wheel build with the short spokes then the finished article would have had a couple of turns of thread protruding from the nipples, which would be unsightly and may weaken the finished wheel as each soft brass nipple would not be “full” of spoke. Most if not all of the spokes on the flip/flop wheel are showing exactly this, a little bit of thread protruding from each of the nipples. It’s a symptom of the shoddy work of someone who didn’t have the correct size, either because an erring punter ordered the wrong ones (like me) or maybe because a shop didn’t have the correct size in stock. This, combined with the rather slack spoke tension that I’d spotted previously, calls into question the quality of the builder’s workmanship. Both of these “faults” suggest that Condor Cycles may have built the wheel to a deadline rather than to an exacting standard.

Notwithstanding these issues, I had been planning to return the flip/flop wheel to the configuration it had when I bought it, namely a doublespeed. It’s now doubtful that I’ll ever get around to doing this because I’ve got a new project in mind, centred upon replacing my unloved On-One Inbred singlespeed frame. While it has some good points (cheap, fairly strong, easy to re-sell) there are lots of reasons why I don’t like the Inbred that much: crap paint that falls off if you so much as look at it oddly; previous poor experience with On-One which has left me with “brand antipathy” rather than the more usual loyalty; and no rear disc mount. Also I’ve grown to dislike with a vengeance the horizontal “track” dropouts along with chain tugs, disc brake incompatibility and general faffing about when removing a wheel. As a means of tensioning a singlespeed chain track dropouts can’t be beaten for outright simplicity, but they are far from being the most elegant solution. The slightest adjustment to chain tension inevitably involves messing with chain tugs to toe-in the wheel and then having to re-align the brakes, both fiddly jobs that I loathe. What I want is a frame with normal vertical drop outs that can be used with a normal quick-release skewer (without tugs!) and that will simply drop out, as it were, when the skewer is undone.

How then to tension the chain? When using a frame with vertical drop-outs the traditional bodge is to use a chain tensioner, something akin to a simplified rear mech (in some cases it IS a rear mech!), but while convenient this is also inelegant and spoils the lines and purity of the bike. Over the past two or three years the likes of Orange (P7), Kona (Unit & Explosif), Voodoo and others have used sliding drop-outs that incorporate normal vertical drop-outs but that can slide fore and aft on the frame and are secured with bolts. Sliding drop-outs are crude and do the same job as a track drop-out while enabling the use of a quick-release skewer. However although using a disc brake does become easier they do nothing to solve the brake alignment problem unless the brake mount is also part of the sliding dropout, something that I think has only been done on the Whyte 19. So sliding drop-outs are still too fiddly and I’m not a fan. No, what I want is something simpler still yet more elegant and that “something” is an eccentric bottom bracket.

An EBB is where the bottom bracket itself is fitted off-centre into a larger cylindrical sleeve that itself sits in an enlarged bottom bracket shell in the frame. To tension the chain, simply rotate the EBB until the chain becomes sufficiently taught, nip up the bolts and off you go! It’s a difficult thing to perfect, because the bottom bracket is a point on a bike where all the stresses and strains meet. Huge torsional forces are applied simultaneously by the rider via the bars, saddle and especially the cranks, and it’s also the place where both front and rear tyres like to deposit mud. Yet what an EBB is effectively doing is adding another moving part to the mix right at this sensitive point. The only budget frame that I know of with an EBB is Dialled Bikes’ £265 Love/Hate. Other budget manufacturers have dabbled with the EBB and ended up producing nothing but a bunch of creaking, groaning bedsteads. Is the Love/Hate any different and if so, why?

It’s been around for about 9 months now and rider feedback says that, yes, it is different. The Love/Hate uses a Phil Wood EBB, which has an excellent reputation as both a simple to use and silent component. I love the concept and the bike looks absolutely stunning in its bright orange colour scheme dressed up with all black components. It will definitely be my next purchase, the only drawback being that I’ll also have to replace my Pace RC31 “shorty” forks because the Love/Hate ideally needs the longer 440mm variety.

Back to the doublespeed concept, and it has occurred to me that with a bit of imagination I could set up my “utility” rear wheel as a single-sided disc-compatible doublespeed if I so wished. This can be done by using two splined cassette cogs and a suitable arrangement of spacers and would consequently render the Flip/Flop wheel redundant, the reasons being threefold: by their very nature, flip/flop hubs are not disc compatible and one of the reasons for buying a Love/Hate is so that I can use a rear disc brake; to use a regular cassette hub would eradicate the need to remove the wheel and flip it over every time I want to change ratios; I don’t think I’ll ever ride a fixie again, if I can help it! Even a single-sided threaded singlespeed hub can be set up as a doublespeed using a double freewheel, available at stupendous cost from White Industries, purveyors of pimpy top-shelf singlespeed finery from the US of A. So my brief dalliance with the Goldtec wheel will almost certainly end with it being sold on when the Love/Hate arrives. For a profit, of course!

Whyte 19

I’ve admired the Whyte 19 since it was first released in 2005 and many is the time when I’ve longingly looked over the demo model in On Your Bike underneath London Bridge Station, despite the dent under its down tube. Rather then building just another hardtail Marin suspension guru Jon Whyte created something that can be used with 100-130mm forks, as a geared bike or singlespeed, dressed up for all eventualities or stripped down for racing. It’s a compelling mix of UK-designed simplicity and Taiwan-made aluminium bling, with straight lines where there should be straight lines and hydroformed curves and bumps only where they make sense – none of the overindulgent nonsense you find on most big-name aluminium hardtails. Then there are the drop-outs, one of which includes a gear hanger and the other the disc brake mount which therefore remains stationary relative to the wheel hub. These can be adjusted back and forth +/- 20mm to alter the effective chainstay length and/or tension a singlespeed chain without the need to constantly fettle the brake calliper.

All clever stuff, but this comes at a price for there are and have always been two major drawbacks to the 19. The clever but pointless Maverick SC32 “upside down” fork does away with the traditional brace and with it all semblance of lateral stiffness and requires a unique hub, and therefore new front wheel, which is 100% incompatible with any other fork out there… except, that is, for the even dafter DUC32. And then there’s the price which, at £1,000 for the frame + silly fork or £2,000 for an XT-level full build, is utterly ludicrous and there’s no way I’d ever pay it. Even £700 for frame + fork as currently offered by Leisure Lakes is pushing the bounds of credibility because I doubt that I could sell that fork for much more than £250 – and anyone weighing more than 11st dripping wet would have to get shot of it or be forever tormented by the thing fluttering away beneath them, to say nothing of its reputation for unreliability. A net £500 or thereabouts for a hardtail frame is almost into “budget” titanium territory.

Were I ever to buy a 19 it would replace my much loved DMR Switchback frame as the heart of my hardnut hardtail. The Switchback was the very first of the now ubiquitous UK-designed long travel steel hardtail genre, since cloned cheaply by Dialled Bikes (Prince Albert) and On-One (Inbred 456) and expensively by Dialled again (PA 853) and Cotic (Soul). However it never gained the cliquey acceptance of these other three, chiefly as a result of several well-photographed frame failures a few inches behind the head tube. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the Switchback is an innovative but flawed design that showed the way for the benefit of others, as did the Comet airliner, but I think that might be both unfair and wrong. After all, over the course of two years I’ve ridden mine harder than I’ve ridden any other bike and it’s still standing unbowed, in spite of my 15st mass bearing down on it. There are rumours, unsubstantiated from what I can tell, that DMR’s initial 2003 batch were victims of some kind of design or manufacturing fault and that on future versions like mine, a 2004 model, although visually identical the problem was cured. It’s plausible, but I don’t think it’s the only explanation because if you look closely at many of the photos of broken Switchbacks you’ll find that they failed while sporting heavy-hitting forks such as Marzocchi DJs, Z1s or 66s. Now, DMR have a hard-earned reputation for building unbreakable CroMo dirt jump and street bikes, yet the Switchback is very much an XC machine, albeit a burly one – and how many XC bikes do you know that can take the abuse dished out by a rider who needs forks like that? None, I’d wager. I reckon many Switchbacks were bought by riders thinking, foolishly, that they were buying a frame light enough for XC but able to withstand the abuse of a traditional DMR, which is just woolly thinking. Admittedly DMR didn’t help in this regard by having the Switchback built with ISCG chain guide mounts! No, I think it’s possible that the poor old Switchback might be a victim of its badge’s hardcore reputation, not of a design weakness.

I’d tweaked and refined the set-up of my Switchback so that it rode beautifully and while a bike like that never steers with pin-point accuracy the natural flex in the frame and 120mm MX Pro fork forgave errant line choices and allowed me to give the bike its head on all but the rockiest descents. Its weight, combined with mine, meant that it crashed through obstacles rather than skittering over them and it really was enormous fun. The last big ride I did on my Switchback was at Thetford Forest where the swoopy singletrack sections might have been designed for it and where it felt perfectly balanced – a kind of cycling nirvana that is often talked about but rarely experienced in actuality.

All in all it sounds like I’d be mad to get rid of it, but times move on, other opportunities arise, there’s always the possibility that the Switchback’s reputation might turn out to be deserved after all and if it is I don’t really want to be around to find that out, to be honest! But the main reason for getting rid of it is that I’ve just bought a Whyte 19. It’s a second hand complete bike in excellent condition, with the original frame from 2005, custom-built at On Your Bike to a high specification and without the dubious Maverick fork. I paid a little short of £900 for the bike, which includes a Pace RC40 XCFR fork, Hope XC/Mavic XC717 wheels, Hope brakes, SRAM X7/9 drivetrain, various high-end pimpery from Race Face, Ritchey & Bontrager and a little too much blue anodising for my tastes. The whole lot must have cost upwards of £2k to put together and I reckon that I can sell the components – excluding the frame, which is the only part I want – for about half that, making the deal entirely self-financing.

The previous owner had the bike set up as a twitchy lightweight XC bike weighing in at about 24lbs with 1.9” tyres on those lightweight wheels and the carbon fork, bars and seatpost. Even though this isn’t my intention for this bike I’m half tempted to keep some of the components and blend them with the best bits from my Switchback. But I’m more interested to see how the frames themselves contrast, so for starters I’ll swap pretty much all of the components straight onto the Whyte, which I’ve already completely dismantled. That was a process infused with melancholy. A lot of love and thought, not to mention time and money, goes into custom building a bike from scratch, and I know it well. And yet two moderate evenings of work can have the whole thing stripped, cleaned, individually photographed and ready for sale! I dare say that the previous owner might be moved to tears at the fate of his creation, but it’s about to be reborn as perhaps the ultimate hardnut hardtail.

Back to Starters on Wheelset 2

It didn’t take long to unwind the abortive start I’d made using the short DT Competition spokes and now I had in prospect a quiet evening, once the kids were in bed, because Mrs P was going out on the razzle with her girly friends. This is the plan, similar to before:

1. Lace the wheel.
2. Take up most of the slack.
3. Align the spokes.
4. Take up the remaining slack.
5. Make the wheel laterally true.
6. Make the wheel radially true.
7. Equalise the spoke tension.
8. Improve the dish.
9. Final tensioning and finishing touches.
10. Pour a large glass of vintage port!

I’m going to start with the rear wheel again, as this is how the Wheelpro guide starts, but following the abortive start I’ve decided that instead of working this wheel all the way to completion before beginning the front I’ll do steps 1 & 2 on the rear, then repeat these on the front, then do step 3 for both wheels before running through steps 4-9 consecutively. The reason for this is that I’m 100% comfortable with the process of tensioning and truing a pre-built wheel, but feel it would help if I do the initial stages all together as I’m less familiar with these and it saves re-reading the same sections of the Wheelpro guide over and over.

It took just over an hour to lace up both wheels and align the spokes. My spokes are STILL not quite long enough! However they’re much easier to work with than before and by simply backing off each nipple by a couple of turns I get the whole lot laced up without much fuss. The wheels are acceptably true and round which should make the remaining steps fairly straightforward. A good time to break for the day!

Second Wheelset Woes!

I was determined that the building of the second “budget” set of wheels, consisting of the 32 hole XT disc hubs, Sun CR18 rims and silver DT Swiss Competition spokes, would go exactly to plan and that it would progress at a fair old lick from beginning to end. I wasn’t planning to start the front wheel until I’d finished the rear and would be following the Wheelpro guide to the letter, seeing as I’ve sold Gerd Schraner’s bizarre collection of thoughts to a fellow on the Singletrack Classifieds forum – for a modest profit (assuming that he ever gets around to sending me the cheque that he’s repeatedly promised)!

This was how it was supposed to happen (and may still do so):

1. Lace the wheel: inside right hand side spokes first, then inside left hand spokes, then those of the outside right hand side and finally the outside left hand side ones. This will avoid Schraner’s bird’s nest.
2. Take up most of the slack using the nipple driver.
3. Get the spokes correctly aligned.
4. Take up the remaining slack using the spoke wrench.
5. Make the wheel laterally true (side-to-side).
6. Make the wheel radially true (up-and-down).
7. Equalise the spoke tension on either side.
8. Improve the dish.
9. Final tensioning and finishing touches.
10. Repeat 1-9 for the front wheel!

I got stuck half way through stage two! As I took up the slack on each successive spoke it very quickly became obvious that there was no way I was going to make it all the way round before the spokes became too tight. The reason was pretty obvious - short spokes - but why?

I soldiered on. The Wheelpro guide has a workaround for when you have spokes that are slightly too short and even including this extra work I had the rear wheel laced up in around an hour. I then set about putting the front wheel together to see if it had the same problem, and after correcting a couple of tiredness-related errors (well, it was late evening!) I had this one laced up in a similar amount of time. But there’s no doubt that the spokes were far too tight on both wheel for this stage of the build. Add to this that the ends of the spokes are nowhere near the tops of the nipples and that there’s also at least two turns worth of thread protruding from the nipple on each spoke and it was time to pack up for the night and have a think.

A good night’s sleep and a check on my spoke calculations the following morning identified the cause of the trouble. Like the indolent fool that I am I’d not bothered to physically measure the rims and had relied solely on the measurements in Spocalc.xls, which it turns out are about 3cm too short for the Effective Rim Diameter. The Sun rims really do have a very shallow centre line, so much so that if the ends of the spokes were to protrude from the nipples by any more than a millimetre or so they would foul the rim tape. It occurs to me that I might not actually have Sun CR18 rims but the cheaper, older CR16s which may simply be stickered up as CR18s, as the latter have an ERD 3mm greater than the former.

I have three options:

1. Carry on regardless;
2. Dismantle the wheels, buy the correct length spokes and start again;
3. Dismantle the wheels, buy Mavic XM317 rims and sell the Suns.

Option 1 would be foolish and would defeat the point of the exercise, because if I wanted a botch job then there are plenty of internet retailers ready and willing to oblige. Option 2 is sensible, but Option 3 is tempting because I was never madly keen on the Sun rims from the outset.

The Singletrack Classifieds forum provides the answer – there’s a chap on there selling thousands of spokes for less than even http://www.rose.de/ will do them for and he’s got my size! I have a choice between silver DT Competition spokes, the same as I currently have, or Alpina’s equivalent in black for £15 with brass nipples. So Option 2 it is: I upgrade to 64 black Alpina F1 ACI double butted spokes, which will have the additional benefit of making the wheels look nicer.

With luck I can sell my German DT Comps for something similar to that, as they are a much more commonly required size for MTBs and seem to fit most Shimano hub/Mavic rim combinations, so all I will have lost is the time spent piecing together and then dismantling the wheels. It was good practice, even if ultimately futile!

The Flip/Flop as a Fixie

This was going to be a new experience. I’ve not ridden a fixed wheel bike since the age of four or five but that had stabilisers so doesn’t count! Task number one was to install the wheel on the bike for the first time, which is when I noticed that the Goldtec hub’s spindle is in fact a fair bit thicker than a normal 10mm rear quick-release-compatible spindle yet it has flats machined into its ends to allow it to be slotted into the frame’s 10mm drop-outs. This has a number of implications: it can be fiddly to engage the hub spindle when it is first offered up to the drop out; it’s not possible to use the DMR-type chain tugs that slot over a standard 10mm spindle and enable the use of quick-release skewers with “track end” style drop-outs; but it does allow the use of meaningfully chunky hex bolts instead. So I had to ditch my DMR chain tugs, and the Deore QR which they allow the use of, in favour of the loathsome On-One tugs that came with the frame and the hex bolts that came with the wheel. It’s no biggie – ready to roll!

The first thing I noticed was that there was nothing to notice, until I absent-mindedly stopped pedalling and my own momentum wrenched my legs unwillingly around a couple of cycles before the brain kicked in. No freewheeling up to kerbs, roots, steps, etc… I’d have to ride right at and over them, and if the pedals hit then tough! That’s not a great feature to have on a MTB, in all honesty. Neither is the need to keep pedalling when leaning into a corner – I broke my leg doing this on a racer in my teens and don’t wish to repeat the experience! Once I was out in open country, with a bit of room to manoeuvre and cruise at a steady pace, it was easy to forget that this was a fixed wheel. Spinning along on the flat or climbing a hill was no different to using a freewheel, but a big difference was to be found when letting the bike go on the downhills. Of course, you can’t stop pedalling and with a single 32/16 ratio it’s not long before things start to get a bit frantic! There are two ways to handle this, assuming that we dismiss spinning your legs so quickly that they unscrew at the hips and you end up a gibbering wreck: grab the brakes, or apply backward pressure on the pedals. I was using soooo much brake that the pads must have been screaming for mercy, so I tried the second approach. It sort of worked, and I dare say that it gets easier and more effective with practice. It’s an odd thing to want to do though. Surely downhills are the payback for having dragged yourself to the top in the first place, so quite why you’d want to expend even more energy by slowing yourself on the way down is lost on me!

I found that the backward pressure technique had but one benefit. The trails are almost universally muddy at the moment and I found that as I instinctively backed off while entering corners the slight braking force that I applied via the pedals was enough to send the rear tyre into a rather exciting controlled slide. Not a full-on skid nor a complete wash-out, but enough to set a bit of adrenaline pumping! That aside though, I found little to recommend a MTB fixie and was glad of the opportunity to flip the wheel over onto its freewheel side. One has to remember that the victimless sins of suspension and gears have already been forgone on this bike, so to do without a freewheel in addition requires much caution heaped upon caution and I found that this limits the fun potential far too much for my liking.

A freewheel is such a cheap, readily available aide that it seems almost daft to wilfully go without one. As I bimbled about the Herts countryside not really making a great deal of effort (see, that’s what singlespeeding does to you) I was trying to think of what might be the advantages of going fixed. There don’t appear to be many!

1) Track stands become very easy;
2) You don’t have to unclip from the pedals at traffic lights and junctions (see 1 above);
3) Fewer moving parts = less to go wrong (but then how many freewheels do you get through!?!);
4) You can apply braking as well as accelerative force to the pedals;
5) You can ride backwards (and, in all probability, fall off trying).

It’s not exactly a fait accompli! One can understand why couriers seem to favour fixies in a city environment, but I don’t know whether track racers do simply because an arcane UCI rule says they must or because there’s some other unseen advantage.
The wheel itself performed faultlessly, however unless I have a “road to Damascus” experience in the meantime it won’t be more than a couple of rides before the track cog is ditched in favour of a second freewheel cog.

The Flip/Flop wheel

This was a great find. The Singletrackworld classified ads forum is a lottery and sometimes you need a bit of luck, such as to log on just a matter of minutes after a juicy “For Sale” ad has been posted. Good deals go fast, it’s strictly first-come-first-served and it was my turn with this one.

The wheel in question consists of a black quick-release or bolt compatible Goldtec Track “flip/flop” hub mated to a black Mavic XM719 rim (the current equivalent of my F519s) with 32 silver DT Champion straight gauge spokes laced three-cross and including two Shimano SF-MX30 freewheel cogs with 16 & 17 teeth respectively. The seller had it built by Condor Cycles, a well known and apparently well regarded bike shop on Grays Inn Road in London, much favoured by the London bicycle courier cognoscenti. We haggled the price down to £55 and I avoided the postage cost by meeting the seller, a nice chap who’d switched to using a fabulously spendy Rohloff Speedhub, to do the deal in person. While the wheel is not exactly how I would have built it (I’d have gone for 36 black DT Competition spokes and tensioned them bit more), it was a fantastic bargain for it is in near-new condition, with hardly any wear to the braking surface of the rim, and hub & freewheel bearings as smooth as new. The hub alone would have cost more new than I paid for the entire wheel!

Since I bought it back in the autumn the flip/flop wheel has sat in my garage doing nothing, waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. Back in August I was thinking of using such a wheel to set up the Inbred as a “doublespeed” by carrying two freewheel cogs with different numbers of teeth, which is what the previous owner had used the wheel for. I will copy this at some point, but initially I’ve decided to remove the 17 tooth freewheel and replace it with a 16 tooth fixed cog.

“A fixed wheel? On a mountain bike?” I hear you cry, “What madness is this!”

Well I read recently, on some website or other, a fixie aficionado stating categorically that everyone needs to try a fixed wheel bike at some time or other or they won’t know what they’re missing. It’s got to be worth a go!

There are several reasons why I’ve been slow to do anything with the flip/flop wheel. Firstly, I couldn’t find a cheap source of a compatible, reasonable quality, threaded “track” cog. This was made more difficult because I didn’t really know what to look for, nor where to find it. Fixed wheels, where the sprocket is screwed directly onto the hub body, seem to be the preserve of cycle couriers and track racers (hence the name “track cog”) and not knowing anyone who could be remotely described as either I was searching in the dark. Certainly the niche singlespeed brand Surly, whose excellent stainless steel chain-ring and cassette cog currently adorn my singlespeed, produce equally good track cogs and lock-rings, but at £30+ they represent very poor value when one considers that a 9 speed Shimano XT cassette can be bought new for less! Eventually I took a punt on a really cheap cog on Ebay, and bought a lock-ring from the same seller for £11.90 in all, even though the item description mentioned something about a “left-hand thread”, the purpose of which I didn’t properly understand at the time.

I didn’t really know what would turn up, but there was no need to worry. The track cog is unbranded but made from thick steel, uses a regular right-hand thread and requires a 1/8” chain, which spreads the loads a bit more and suits my SRAM PC1 chain just fine. It’s also black which will allow it to sit unobtrusively to the left when not in use. The lock-ring is aluminium and also black, but unfortunately the 4-point tool required to fit and remove it has smaller pins than the tool required to remove a Shimano freewheel, and I don’t have one. You pays your money… Nevertheless, for now I can tighten it sufficiently using a pin spanner. The interesting thing about this is that it has a left-hand thread: in other words, you tighten it by screwing it the opposite way to the track cog. I had imagined that this would render it useless, but on closer inspection the Goldtec hub has a smaller, opposing thread sitting outboard of the cog threads at the ends of its body. I’d initially thought that these smaller threads were for use with cogs of 15 teeth or less, but the lock-ring screws on to them, butting up against the track cog and thus securing it firmly in place. Simple!

Then there were the tyres. Originally my singlespeed had been fitted with 2.4” WTB Mutano Raptors, a very light tyre for their size and with a tread pattern suited to hardpack but little else. Consequently they were very quick (which I liked) but tended to give up all pretence at grip in the wet or when cornering hard (which I didn’t like… repeatedly). At the time I finished building my utility wheels I found some 2.5” Syncros FLT Race tyres reduced from £35 each to just £10 that were apparently too good to resist. My reasoning was that if they did the trick then I’d buy a third tyre to fit to the flip/flop wheel, but unfortunately they proved to be a duff purchase. While being very big and giving extraordinary cornering grip they turned out to have the worst rolling resistance that I’ve ever experienced and were also heavy. So they had to go, and fortunately a foolish Ebay punter paid me more for them covered in mud than I had paid when I bought them new, or indeed more than he could have paid if he’d shopped around! As long as he’s happy, the dopey sap…! I replaced the unloved Syncros tyres by returning from whence I had come, to WTB, but this time I was trying their 2.5” Weirwolf Race. These had got a glowing write-up in Singletrack’s mega tyre test last year and were now on offer for £15 each. They miraculously combine most of the speed of the old Mutano Raptors with most of the grip of the Syncros FLTs thanks to soft compound DNA rubber, all for a reasonable weight: exactly what I was after, so after just a couple of rides on these I bought a third Weirwolf and have just finished building up the flip/flop wheel. Test ride time!

Utility Wheels @ 6 months

It’s been a good six months since I started my wheel building project. The utility wheels, currently installed on my On-One Inbred singlespeed (the cheapie version with track ends, made from “DN6” gas pipe), have given five months of service through an autumn and half a traditional English winter. How are they coping?

Well, this could be a very short post because they have been faultless. In fact so much so that I no longer even think about the fact that I’m riding on my very own hand-built wheels. In spite of the hours of tender loving care that brought them into the world, and the admiring glances that I was forever giving them when new, now I just… I can hardly believe I’m writing this, but… yes, I fear that inadvertently I may have begun taking them for granted!

That’s potentially a good thing – possibly the best thing that could have happened, because it implies that I have total faith in the wheels. But is this misplaced? Such blasé confidence is only justified if you know for a fact that the wheels have been correctly built. Assuming that the wheels are undamaged in any way, you can objectively establish this with three simple checks: the wheel is radially and laterally true; it is centrally dished; the spokes are tight and their tension is even throughout. These three indicators are quickly and easily measured, before, during and after every ride if you wish (I don’t), and if you can give all three the thumbs up then you’re hot to trot!

So, there’s not a great deal else to say about the wheels. The Inbred itself has benefited from Pace RC31 carbon forks up front to replace the hated On-One Superlight steel wrist-breakers that Inbreds come fitted with as standard, and the wheels now sport huge new boots in the shape of WTB’s Weirwolf 2.5”, a great all-rounder.

Coming up…

It’s time to revive the Diary, I think! Six months have passed since my wheel building quest began and since my last post back in August 2006 I’ve been up to a few other things that have kept the wheel building and blogging on hold.

The pair of wheels that I built back in the summer, the all-purpose “utility” set consisting of Mavic F519 rims, Shimano XT disc hubs and DT Competition spokes, is still going strong and I’ll provide a medium term report on them next week.

I’ve not yet got around to building the second set, the “budget” set for Mrs P’s bike consisting of Sun CR18 rims, Shimano XT disc hubs and DT Competition spokes. This is principally because I haven’t been bothered enough but they wouldn’t have been used until this coming spring in any case. Mrs P is not exactly a keen rider and the only time she’d go out on a bike was if it wasn’t muddy or raining and if we could bring the kids along for the ride too! Our youngest won’t be a year old until April, so he’s only been able to ride in a kiddie seat for a couple of months or so. However with spring only another couple of months away and with about £125 worth of wheels to sell when I get the new ones built – that’s £125 to spend on some new project – it’s high time they were assembled! Look out for updates over the next few weeks.

One project that was but the germ of an idea back in August has come to fruition unexpectedly quickly: that being a flip/flop rear wheel for use on the singlespeed. Ideally I would liked to have built it myself, I was fortunate enough to spot such a wheel being sold second hand in the STW classifieds which fitted my own specification almost exactly – a Goldtec flip/flop hub mated to a Mavic XM719 rim with DT Champion spokes and including 16 & 17 tooth freewheels, all for £55. The cost of the individual parts alone is about £140 and the shop that built it would probably have added at least another £20 for putting them all together! I’ve not even test-ridden it yet, and I’ll expand on what I’m going to do with this wheel in a future post.

Also still on my “to do” list is the re-tensioning of my lightweight Hope/XC717 wheels that were so badly built by Chain Reaction, and the dismantling of my very first wheel building attempt, a Hope/X221 mish-mash. My aim is to get all this done before spring is sprung.

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 ;-)