adroitfixed

Just wanted to post some picts of my first home built wheelset. The Front is a pretty common radial lace pattern, the rear is a bit more exotic, its called a 3 leading, 3 trailing. I would highly recommend buiding your own wheelset if you were ever thinking of trying. I was told that it was extremely hard and after showing my rear wheel pattern, most of my LBS told me I didnt have a prayer. Well, 8 hrs later I had to true wheels to throw on my vintage motobecane. Cheers!

adroitfixed

A detail of the lacing on the rear wheel...

adroitfixed

And the front...

adamkell

nice job on the build and the pics.

do you ride brakeless? weigh much?

BostonFixed

Here are my bud zev from another forum wheels: "pinecone wheels"







https://bikecult.com/works/parts/pinecone48.html

Kiecker

Are the spokes curved or is it the lacing that's giving that appearance?

adroitfixed

I ride brakeless and weight 190lbs.

adroitfixed

Its interesting, this pinecone lace is very simular to what I have done, with the exception of the sets of spokes dont weave each other. The leading and trailing spokes simply lay on top of one another.

adroitfixed

There are slight curves on the very outside spokes of each group of 3 due to the weaving and harsh angle. Should I have concerns about this?

Kiecker

I'm not a wheel builder so I have no idea, but I would think you'd want as staight of a spoke as you can get so you're not inducing a wierd moment through a curved spoke, but what do I know?

ryan_c

I'm goin' with a no.

Just make sure your tensions are good, and that you properly stress-relieved the wheel.

thechamp

I've been playing around with the threeleading threetrailing pattern on old steel wheels I have in the basement. It's nice because the spoke length is standard 3x so you can play with it without buying new spokes.

As adfixed mentions, the two different (3l3t) wheels above have slightly different approaches with regards to actually weaving the spokes. Zev's wheels actually have one weave, so to speak, per set of six spokes which is alot easier and why the spokes aren't curved so much, while adfixed's spokes all have some weave going on. From my playing around, it's easier to weave all your spokes on a high flange hub since they're a little more spaced out at the flange and you end up with a little less curve going on.

I wouldn't worry about the curving as long as everything is well tensioned, those twisted spoke wheels seem to work ok for some people and they've got alot more curve. I also read somewhere about somone doing no weaving without issue, but I'm not so sure about this.

Apparently you can do a similar build with 2leading 2trailing on 32 hole wheels (with 2x spoke length). I've been wanting to do this for a while because I think you end up with four spoke "quadrants" instead of three. If you mix black and stainless spokes you could have two quadrants of each (on opposite sides) which I think could look pretty darn cool. I haven't seen any pictures of this though so I'm not 100% sure about this...

phidauex

I love the 3leading 3trailing spoke lace.. I've been riding on those for quite a while on my tall bike, including a lot of weight and hopping off stuff. It may not be quite as strong as 3 cross, but if you really think about it, it is almost the same as 3x, just organized differently, so it has to be reeeaaallly close.

I think you really want to interlace the spokes, even on these patterns. Interlacing adds a LOT to the strength of a wheel.

The spokes are curved a bit for sure, I notice when lacing up that the spokes with the most aggressive bend thread less into the nipple than the others. I don't think it matters, since it is the tension that is required, not the specific shape of the spoke.

Nice looking wheels, I want to see them on the bike!

peace,
sam

phidauex

I like the 2 leading 2 trailing idea on a 32 hole using 2x length spokes... I think the alternating colors would be nice! I might have to try it sometime.

Tell your LBS to shove it. Most of them have no idea if it would be safe or not, but just assume it wouldn't be, because its not the way they learned to do it. Mechanics in general often have this problem... Now, many of them have a more open mind, real engineers at heart, and would probably tell you something reasonable like, "It looks like it will be almost as strong as 3x, but probably offers no practical benefits besides making it easier to air up the tires and clean the hub. I wouldn't officially recommend it, but if you want a really different looking wheel, go for it." But that would take more time to say than, "NO WAY!!".

peace,
sam

phidauex

Oh, and one more thing... (dont' feel like hitting the edit button)..

Stress relieve the hell out of those wheels! There is a lot of bending and settling that the spokes are going to want to do right away, more than a normal 3x, and you want to get as much of that out of the way as possible before getting them on the bike.

peace,
sam

adroitfixed

Here is a pic of the Grand Record Motobecane... I will post an after shot, I think some more spoke settling is necessary before i can post an after shot.

Thanks for all the insight.

Jaminsky

I am definitely hesitant to trust what bostonFixed has got going on with no interlacing, that ish looks shady. Then again, the interlacing that adroit has looks super aggressive, like overly so. I've never seen a 3l3t wheel laced before and it looks awesome. You should go up to Harris Cyclery and get that certified by Sheldo sometime. LBS's always try and tell you it's impossible to build your own wheel set if you've never done it, when of course it just takes a bit of time. They talk of horror stories with spoke breaking and rim damage, they want you to pay them to build your wheels...eff 'em.

Rashiki

This being your first wheelset, did you just do this all on an idea? Did you read a book to learn general wheel building skills and also how to do these patterns? What's the best book to learn how to build wheels? I'd really like to make some wheels myself.

^oZ

That looks like an exellent job!

Ken Cox

I found a technical paper on spoke lacing and strength.
It comes as a .pdf and so I can't cut and paste from it.

https://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/papers/...heel-Paper.pdf

The author concludes with the statement that for normal riding stresses the pattern doesn't matter.
Given a number of spokes, lace them anyway you want.

He does say that spoke patterns and wheel designs that result in longer spokes will handle lateral loads better than will designs with shorter spokes.
I assume, then, that riders who do a lot of tricks or use a lot of techniques would want a low flange hub and a pattern that produced the longest spokes.
I emphasize the word assume in the preceding sentence.
It seems a little counter-intuitive.

Mr. Shadow

I had a 2 leading 2 trailing 32 spoke wheel built by a Park Tool certified wrench. It looks great.
It's not as strong as a normal 2 cross, but I don't ride all that hard these days.

Mr. Shadow

That made my brain hurt.

Ken Cox

Mr. Shadow wrote, regarding the link I posted to the technical article:

"That made my brain hurt."

Well, I found another site that agrees and disagrees with the technical paper:

https://www.geocities.com/spokeanwheel/trig.htm

From the above site:

"In a cross laced wheel the spokes are longer than they would be in a radially laced wheel. The longer a spoke is the easier it is to stretch, and this also reduces lateral strength. These reasons are why many track wheels have high flange hubs. The larger the diameter of the flange, the shorter and stronger the spokes, combined with the resulting angles of the spokes at both the hub and rim that make the wheel firmer, all these factors add up to give the wheel higher lateral strength and better torque transfer performance."

Visiting all the pages on the above site leaves me thinking that one of the lacings, like the several variations on the Crow's Foot, which combine cross lacing with radial lacing would give the best of all possible worlds.
A 36 spoke Crow's Foot laced wheel would have 24 cross-laced spokes and 12 radially-laced spokes.
Even more interesting, though, a 32 spoke Hybrid Crow's Foot laced wheel would have 16 radially-laced spokes and 16 cross-laced spokes.

RJOsprey

I have built all of my wheels on 2 bikes. My favorite is 2x Crows' Foot, but I do a modification; I make the radial spoke a bit thinner DT Revolution, 14/17/14 blacks and the crossing spokes are DT Competion 14/15/14 silvers. This means the spokes flex about equally to jarring, radials typically flex less, and the wheel stays true longer. But the black radials with crossing silvers also just plain looks cool.