Many years ago, I decided to try my hand at building my own wheels. Armed with a copy of Jobst Brandt's "The Bicycle Wheel," rims and spokes from Wheelsmith, I did manage to make a build a pair of wheels. The front was OK (until I crashed and bent it beyond repair), the rear wasn't a very usable wheel. I learned two things from my experience:
1: I will happily pay a professional to build my wheels. 2: How to better true and maintain my wheels, which has been invaluable knowledge. When I picked up a pair of clearance wheels from Supergo, armed with my knowledge of how incomplete machine-build wheels are, I followed the final tensioning (heavy gloves, lots of squeezing and flattening etc.) and truing instructions from Jobst's book and turned cheap off-the-rack wheels into quite good ones. They lasted for many years until a spoke pulled through the rear rim, and the front would still be going strong if I hadn't bought a Velocity-built pair from Riv to replace them. Go for it, at the very least, you'll have a better appreciation for what goes into building wheels, whether they're well built or poorly built. Drew On Monday, October 19, 2020 at 8:25:58 AM UTC-7 Steven Seelig wrote: > So with COVID and all, I've decided that now is the time to do stuff that > I haven't ever done before. Learning to speak French is perhaps a bridge > too far - not so good at language. But it seems reasonable to think that I > can at least build a front wheel with a Dyno hub to put on the Sam I ride > in the means streets of DC and on some gravel. > > I have a truing stand but not a dishing tool. I would say I am a > competent wrencher. Of course anyone who has built up a wheel did it once > for the first time. Is this something I should take on? What are the odds > for success? Will I quit in frustration? > > Points of view encouraged. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/72803906-e4df-4aad-9fac-a885be7f15can%40googlegroups.com.
