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calling all wheel builders

1K views 6 replies 7 participants last post by  Mike Prince 
#1 ·
I'm really looking into starting to build wheels for myself and I was wondering if you could point me to some of the best online wheelbuilding sites as well as the best books on the art. Finally, where do you all prefer to buy your spokes? A lot of sites that I've seen online has somewhat limited stock available. Thanks in advance for your input.

Cheers,

Ben
 
#3 ·
Something that is more fun and better in so many ways is to just ask your shop to teach you. Obviously you'll offer to pay for their time and it will be so much easier and fun. You will be able to ask questions if you don't understand something, see someone do it if you can't etc. It will cost a little bit more but it will be well worth it.
 
#4 ·
Spiderman said:
Something that is more fun and better in so many ways is to just ask your shop to teach you. Obviously you'll offer to pay for their time and it will be so much easier and fun. You will be able to ask questions if you don't understand something, see someone do it if you can't etc. It will cost a little bit more but it will be well worth it.
Actually that could qualify as an example of "the blind leading the blind" and be a good exercise of learning bad habits.
 
#5 ·
Wheel building is fun!

Ben,

First of all, if you're interested in doing it right wheelbuilding can be one heck of a lot of fun... well worth doing. Google will reveal most of the websites that give good info on wheelbuilding, might just take a little a patience with the search engine.

I've found three books pretty helpfull:

The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt (considered by many to be the bible of wheelbuilding)
The Wheel by G. Schraner (very slightly more practically informative than Brandt's book, but much more of an entertaining read)
Barnett's Manual... very much a "...slot A into Tab B..." kind of instruction but well worth a read.

As to ordering spokes... if you want to do less than full boxes of a specific length or size, I've found Colorado Cyclist (www.coloradocyclist.com) to be helpful. As a first time wheelbuilder finding a LBS that can cut spokes to length can be extremely useful.
 
#6 ·
Here

First off check out the wheelbuilding forum at MTBr. It recently changed to wheels & tires but there is still a lot of good knowledge. Mike Garcia from OddsandEndos posts at Bianchi4me over there when he has time. Here are the standard links...

Wheelbuilding forum
http://forums.mtbr.com/forumdisplay.php?f=60

Sheldon Brown
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html

Mike T. (Who posts here and MTBr as Mike T.)
http://www.execulink.com/~dtierney/wmc/faq.htm#WTQ1

Barnett Manual
http://www.bikeforums.net/barnettes/barnetts_ch16.pdf

For spokes and rims I use Mike Garcia's website
http://www.oddsandendos.com
 
#7 ·
Another one (or two)

I have the Brandt book and it is an excellent resource (as are all the other ones posted here), but equally useful IMO are unmentioned to this point are the instructions in the "Bicycling Guide to Maintenance" and "Zinn and The Art of Roadbike Maintenance" (those probably are not the exact titles, I don't have them in front of me).

These focus on the "how to" of building basic 3-cross wheels, versus the more technical approach of some other wheelbuilding books. When I built my first set way back when I read the Brandt book from cover to cover, felt like I was a wheel scientist, then followed the Bicycling book instructions to build a great set of 36 spoke 3x wheels.

As far as spokes, I usually mail order mine. I use Excel as my primary source and my experience is that if you tell them the hubs, rims and spoking pattern you want to use, they can figure out the length for you. Also, there are several spoke calculators available on the web to help figure out the right length. I don't use my LBS because historically they haven't had what I want in stock. If you know what type of spokes you want to use, a Google search usually turns up lots of sources.
 
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