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Home   Blog   How to Build Wheels

How to Build Wheels

March 25, 2017 5 Comments

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.

 

Dour but persistent!

 

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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5 Responses

mike
mike

February 12, 2024

Erics wheelbuilding article is a great one,very simple to follow,I see this method starts the spoke lacing on the non-drive side first spoke hole to the left,i assume this is to place all trailing spokes on the inside of the hub,park tool method is to place key spoke 2nd hole to the right,Roger Mussons method is key spoke to the first left hole,I geuss if you build your wheels with uniform spoke tension I cant see the difference between any pattern,people are still debating this one,even shimano did not say why building disk brake rims their way was a better way,I see the bicycle wheel doing its job no matter what pattern is used

Dave
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…

Jack Newman
Jack Newman

November 02, 2021

With the help of this article, I am so grateful to provide such a amazing information. Keep posting and thanks for sharing.

Kelly
Kelly

November 02, 2021

Thanks for the informative information Ric

Anonymous
Anonymous

November 02, 2021

This was important to me also. I have referred these articles to many wheel builders, experienced or not.
Thanks

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