Originally Posted by
Iride01
Okay... in the past when on more than one occasion I looked at building my own wheels, I didn't find the cost of good name brand rims very expensive. Certainly not enough to have made me look for a budget rim. It was spokes and nipples that took the price of the wheels I would have built outside the price I paid for what essentially were wheels with the same rims and hubs. Mavic rims with Shimano hubs.
I'm not saying that trying to talk you out of building your own wheels. The gist of that is that the price difference between budget rims and name brand decent rims isn't going to save that much money.
At least it didn't last time I looked.
Decided to try Ryde DP16. Probably the next time I will go with something more expensive, right now I have another bicycle waiting to be rebuilt. As for spokes, previously I was paying something like £8 for a set of no name 36 spokes and nipples and also got a whole bag of Sapim nipples laying about. This time I got Sapim Leader spokes, 65 of them, £25 with delivery. This puts the price of the wheelset in the £100 ballpark. Of course, if I had to buy new hubs, went for higher end rims and spokes the price would be significantly higher and closer to a prebuild set. But the thing is that I actually like building my own wheels, though previously I've been always doing that with second hand rims, spokes, hubs etc. So I treat this also as education / training. And it's also fun
