Wheels

[andygates]

The spoked wheel is one of the critical technologies that makes bikes work: it is incredibly strong, incredibly light, and pretty much changed the world.  The social revolution that came with the bike depends on the cheap reliable ubiquity of tensioned, tangentially-spoked wheels.

Building wheels makes me smile.  The whole blacksmith thing comes in: taking bits and making a whole using skill and a little finesse; ending up with a whole greater than the sum of the parts.  It is to fettling what compiling is to code: you get something useable at the end of it, but you may need to frotz around a little first.  But it's not a black art, unlike, say, regex or the perfect flapjack.

These are my new race wheels: stock Bontrager hubs, DT Swiss RR 1.2 deep-section aero rims, laced up with black Sapim double-butted stainless spokes.  Should be tough and fast and durable.  The front is radial, mostly for looks; it's my first full-size radial wheel, and they're fussier to build than tangentially-spoked wheels.  And not finished a moment too soon, either: these are what I'm racing on on Sunday morning.  So if I screwed up, that's when I get to spit out my dental work :)

Comments

[xeeny.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a coder, I really, really hope that making wheels is nothing like hacking or compiling. Otherwise, you'll need about a zillion test rides before you could use it in anger...

[andygates.livejournal.com]

First couple are a bit dodgy. But once you get the hang of it, you can make a safe wheel easily enough - it's getting one that stays true a year later that's the challenge, given that a rider may have put hundreds of hours and some offroad silliness in there while you weren't checking.

The usual mistake is to make the spokes too loose, so they go a bit slack at certain points in the ride (i.e. at the bottom, or when honking out of the saddle). Spokes should be under tension all the time: it's a tension structure. Once they go slack, they can unscrew a little and flex, which lets the wheel get untrue and admits metal fatigue into them.