A good primer on basic wheel building is hard to find. I'm regularly asked to create one since the articles in our library address wheel building subtleties, concerns past the initial challenge to assemble a rideable one.
Here is part of the solution, four articles (10k words!) written in 1986 for BICYCLING magazine. Many of our present day concerns (extreme dishing, carbon fiber rims, tubeless systems, disk brakes, etc.) are missing. The fundamentals have not changed so this series is still useful.
It is a good, basic primer on wheel building that is still relevant 30 years later. After all, the tensioned wheel remains at the heart of cycling and the laws of physics are unchanged.
The link is here. Hope you find it useful. I am working on an updated version of this instruction but it keeps getting delayed. Go figure.
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Dave
January 30, 2023
After a failed attempt at building a wheel as a rookie mechanic, this article showed up in the the-current issue of Bicycling!
Eventually taught many young mechanics using this method over the years.
I wish this came up more often on internet searches, it has to be hard for a new wheelbuilder to sort through all the nonsensical articles out there…