Here's a page from Motorcyclist, Oct 2017. Bicycle wheel builders can feel like we're alone in the world but, not true! Motorcycle wheel building is as demanding in many ways, and success depends on mastering tension wire structures. It's also as least as hard to make a living.
Buchanan's is a legendary motorcycle wheel center, still going strong. Read and think about our brethren builders as trends seem to be moving us a bit closer together these days.
We have much in common—mastery of craft, builders = riders, love of the outdoors, cars = enemies, fierce independence!
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Benjamin Maiden
June 06, 2026
I worked at a factory where we built recumbents, 3-wheelers and 4-wheelers, mostly electric and for off-road riding, but still lightweight and using a lot of bicycle technology. We needed to beef up the specs on our 20" hub-motor wheels. The hubs were giant and the rims small, so typical spoke tensiometers wouldn’t fit between spokes. Wheel Fanatyk’s new extra-narrow tensiometer might have solved that! To reach the necessary toughness, we landed on alloy motorcycle rims and thick 10-gauge spokes, which required more torque than we could apply with a nipple wrench. We bought a torque wrench made for motorcycle spokes, and reshaped the jaw to fit through narrow gaps without scratching the rim. The tool’s leverage was excellent, but measuring nipple torque is a poor way to estimate spoke tension, and besides the tool’s actual torque wandered unpredictably. So there were problems we had to solve. I found myself able to fine-tune for consistent, high spoke tension by plucking spokes and listening like a harp player. I tugged at the middle of each spoke to feel how far I could bend it, becoming the tensiometer I needed. Sometimes the puzzles seemed insoluble, but when we solved them, production speed went way up. The resulting wheels were beautiful, and consistently held up to abuse. Having my assumptions upended on a regular basis made me a better wheel builder and a better person.