Work usually gets in the way of my wheel-building habit. Not yesterday. Here's how I spent the first day of 2013:
- A morning ride. The roads were deserted as DC slept off its New Year's hangover.
- Build 1: Wide 50mm carbon tubular rear wheel laced to a White Industries hub. Pic below.
- Build 2: This is more involved because I had to deconstruct a tubular wheel. This went as follows: 1) pry off the tire using plastic tire levers; 2) curse myself for using so much glue; 3) carefully remove the spokes (the procedure is wheel-building in reverse); 4) curse the crappy hub I used in the first place; and 5) lace up the new hub/spokes.
- Inventory. There are about 500 spokes in my room at the moment. Knowing how many I've got, what lengths, what colors, and their butting is pretty important if I don't want to order redundant spokes. So I spent 30 minutes sorting, counting, and inputting the requisite info into the database.
Notes:
- A roll of athletic tape is indispensable. I usually tag a piece to the rim opposite the valve hole for use as a reference when I am tensioning a wheel. I also use small pieces of it to mark high and low spots on the rim when I am doing radial truing. The tape doesn't leave any residue.
- Keep that spoke tension chart handy. You will notice it in the background of the photos. That's not a prop. Only the truly pro and the truly amateur build wheels without a tension meter. The Jedi way is to acoustically tune your wheel. Easton wheels are acoustically tuned and are some of the finest around.
- If you are building lots of deep rim wheels, get yourself a nipple guide like this one. There is nothing louder and more annoying than a loose nipple rattling around in a deep V carbon rim. The poor man's way of doing this is to thread a spoke into the back side of the nipple, and guide it into the spoke hole.
- If you are going the el cheapo route for #3, use a spoke that is a different color, a different configuration (j bend or straight pull), or exactly the same length as the spokes you are lacing to the rim. Why? Because, if you are lacing silver 272mm spokes and using a silver 280mm as your el cheapo nipple guide, without fail you will pick up the 280 and lace it. Then you will be wondering what the hell went wrong. Seriously, this will happen.
The title of this post refers to Build #1 which is now 90 percent complete. The driveside spokes are at 110 Kgf and the NDS are at 45 Kgf. Those #s need to be: 120 and 50. I will make one more careful adjustment to the spoke tension before the final radial and lateral truing.
About dish:
There are a number of ways to check the dish of your rear wheel: 1) a dishing gauge; 2) a properly calibrated truing stand; 3) installing the wheel in your bike frame and eyeballing it between your chainstays; and 4) measuring spoke tension. I list #1-3 in order of preference. For #4 a bit of math is involved. The NDS spokes should be 40-60% of the tension of the driveside spokes--depending on the dimensions of your hub. Determine your optimal NDS spoke tension by dividing the center-to-flange distance on the driveside by that same dimension for the NDS.
For example: the White Industries T-11 center-to-flange distance is 18mm and 38mm for the DS and NDS (respectively). That would be 18/38 for non driveside spokes that are 42 percent the tension of the driveside spokes. Seems low, right? Maybe, but it does work: the White Industries hubs are the most reliable I've used.
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| I love these hubs. 270 bucks and made in the USA. The large flange on the driveside reduces spoke lengths, which increases the relative strength of the spoke. |
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| Athletic tape is indispensable for wheel-building. |
