Bike From Scratch

This post is a continuation of my last post on how to build a bike wheel. In this post we will cover bringing the spokes up to tension and truing the wheel. To complete the instructions in this post you will need a truing stand and a spoke wrench, a flat head screw driver may also be helpful.

Step one is to stick the wheel in the truing stand. If you have a self centering truing stand all the better as you won’t need a separate dishing tool or have to flip the wheel around. I’m of firm resolve that a dishing tool is a waste money unless you’re doing this professionally. If you don’t have a self centering stand than flip the wheel over in the stand and make sure the rim is the same distance away. If its not tighten the spokes on the side that’s farther from center, and loosen spokes on the side that’s nearer to center. We are getting ahead of ourselves here. All that to say resist the urge to buy a dishing tool, at least until you’ve tried it without one first.

Alright, so back to step one. Place the wheel in your truing stand. Starting at the valve hole tighten every spoke nipple until two threads remain visible on the spoke. This gets all of the spokes to the same relative tension (provided your rim is round), and gives you an even starting point. Use the screwdriver to do this and not the spoke wrench, it’s much faster. Everything is pretty loose at this point and the spokes are still curvy.

Starting at the valve hole, rotate the wheel and tighten each nipple one turn. Do this all the way around, and keep repeating until you can’t move the rim back and forth anymore.  Once there is a bit of tension on the wheel you need to start paying attention to truing. Truing is done in two directions. The rim should not move side to side (wobble) but it also must be kept round (vertical true). Furthermore you need to keep the wheel properly dished (the rim needs to be in the center of the axle), and you need to make sure you don’t put too much tension on the wheel. Too much tension will lead to cracked rims, broken spokes and most likely stripped out spoke nipples.

So basically you keep tightening the spokes up until you get the right tension, truing the whole time. My method of attack for this was to do it by tone. Sheldon Brown’s site talks about this. To me that means it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. I have wheel set that’s built up in a three cross pattern on some old mountain bikes, so I used those as a reference (the wheels have proved to be pretty much bomb proof, so my logic is this will get me close). There is also a fancy spoke tension meter tool that park makes to check spoke tension with a chart. This seems like a neat purchase, but after spending all this money on parts and tools it seems extraneous.

The process I would use to tension the wheel  is to get the wheel laterally true, and then switch to vertically, then check laterally. Do this slowly (I took two nights of House reruns). Small changes, epically as the spokes get tighter make a huge difference. Start out with half turns, then quarter then one eighth. I’d then check the tone, if it wasn’t where I wanted it I’d turn every spoke 1/2 a turn or 1/4 a turn (I’d more or less tune the wheel as you would a guitar). After I brought everything up to tension, I’d repeat the process. When you’re done with this you should have a nice round and true rim with proper spoke tension. Stick it on a bike and go ride it for a few miles. Take a look and make sure its still true. If it isn’t stick it back in the stand and true it up.

Two important things to remember. Once you get some tension on the spokes the spoke will twist when you turn the spoke wrench. To alleviate this turn the wrench in the opposite direction 1/8th of a turn. This will untwist the spoke. If you don’t do this the spoke will untwist when you put pressure on it (ride the bike) and cause the wheel to go out of true. The other important thing to remember is to release stress on the spokes while your doing the tensioning. There are many methods described to do this on the interwebs, some seem a bit brutal, such as sticking the hub on a stool and pressing on the rim. Another recommended by Sheldon Brown is to use a crank arm to relieve stress (check the Seating and Stress Relieving the Spokes section). The process I used was to grab the spokes next to each other and across from each other and squeeze them together. This seemed more gentle than the stool method and less scary than the crank arm method. The picture in Sheldon’s method freaks me out, I’m sure its fine but it seems like you could seriously screw things up your first time out with that method. Being a novice at this I went with the safe squeeze them together and re-true if needed method.

That’s it. Wheels are built, I’m ready to go out and ride them when the rest of the parts show up and I can get the bike assembled.