Yes, they're expensive. The various machines involved in a wheel building facility cost about $200,000 or so. With them, 2 people can produce roughly 30 wheels per hour. The various machines have different production capacities, so a differently organized line with a more efficient array of machinery can raise productivity by almost another 50%, dropping the labor time to about 3 man minutes per wheel.
About 40 years ago, I visited the Huffy plant and they had a high capacity wheel tightener that simultaneously tightened 36 nipples to a preset tension, with a flow through capacity of almost 10 wheels per minute. I don't know if anybody in the USA still uses this particular machine, but bike companies who have to produce hundreds of thousands pairs of wheels per year, have to be able to do so very efficiently.
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