Originally Posted by
JonathanGennick
It's like with "steel cut" oatmeal. No one really knows what that means, but it sure sounds good.
Steel cut oats vs rolled
The oat seed is cut into pieces rather than being flattened.
Originally Posted by
JonathanGennick
IBack in the day perhaps the machines weren't so good, so one did want a human at the end to add the finishing touches. Maybe that's still true, though I think machines have come a long way.
Today I see "hand built" as suggesting a certain level of love and care and attention to detail. You can know that someone who loves bikes obsessed over building your wheel, as opposed to a machine operator pushing buttons.
From some videos I've seen, it looks like many wheels are hand laced then tensioned in a machine. I've also seen a very old video of a machine that laces the wheel as well as tensioning it. The problem, however, is that the tensioning isn't something that lends itself to the level of programing that we currently have. There are too many variables for the spokes to be tightened up to a specific tension and just left there. You can do that by hand and you'll probably have a very wobbly wheel. Robots are really good at doing something repetitive but they aren't so good a making judgements.