CrimsonEclipse

...

mcoomer

Sheldon of course!

HillRider

Jobst Brandt's "The Bicycle Wheel" will provide practical lacing instructions but will also tell you WAY more than you really want to know about the theory.

kendall

on my back porch when I was 11. had a bent rim with a good hub, and a good rim with a bad hub, so I put them together and came up with a good rim.
Since then I've done motorcycle and car rims on a semi regular basis.

ken.

tspoon

I took my front apart, after marking on the hub and rim numerically from the valve stem. Then put it back together. You've got the other wheel to copy, assuming they're laced the same.

moxfyre

On a cold winter's night, in Beltsville, MD, in the basement with an old rim, a new fixed-gear hub and spokes, and my old laptop open to Sheldon Brown's wheelbuilding guide

By the end of lacing and truing, there were lithium-greasy fingerprints all over the laptop

waterrockets 

I rebuilt my first rear using my front as a guide. I managed to get the stem between the right spokes, but missed the hub label through the valve hole. I had just enough income to afford the parts, and this was back before I knew of "The Bicycle Wheel." Since then, I've used Sheldon's lacing method a lot, and Jobst's some too.

redtires

+infinity on this book. It's required reading for anyone wanting to learn to build wheels. I read it when I was about 17, and have built literally hundreds of wheels over the last 19 years. But for sure, practice makes perfect...and, uh....never stop practicing!

Deanster04

Learned from an old master Spence Wolf. Another good book is Gerd Schraner's book The Art of Wheelbuilding. There are many ways to orient the spokes and you need first to understand that you need to understand something about the physics (don't let that word scare you) of the wheel and what is a pulling spoke, how the different braking methods affect the wheel. Sheldon is a fantastic start.

moxfyre

I just did something similar with computers today... I found three partially stripped ones and made a Franken-computer. One had a decent motherboard and 1ghz processor, another had 384 megs of RAM and network and video cards, and the third had CD-ROM and floppy drives. I added a power supply from another busted computer, and a couple cables, and voilà, I had a working Linux box. So I guess four different computers actually got combined into this one. Yikes.

Reminds me of the way I built my girlfriend's bike, starting with a nice Nishiki Sport I picked up off craigslist, and combining other used but good parts.

Psydotek

Lacing a wheel is easy. Getting it trued and tensioned, that's not so easy...

urbanknight

I learned from an older racer (1976 Olympic Team member) who showed me by building one wheel with me, then watching me do the second one.

smurf hunter

Running linux on franken-hardware is usually the best bang for your buck. I follow a similar thought process for wheels - I get older premium hubs like Dura-ace, clean and service as needed and that saves a couple hundred $$$ per wheelset. Obviously I've got to hunt around for parts, but it almost makes the whole process mean more.

operator

True for the home user only. Or small setups.

moxfyre

I think he meant, "Running Linux on franken-hardware is the best bang for your buck, compared to running Windows on that same hardware"... not "The best way to run Linux is on something you've pulled out of the dumpster." At least, that's how I understood it!

Obviously, maintaining a bunch of heterogeneous and out-of-date hardware would be a nightmare in most large business environments. Though I do know someone who built a Beowulf cluster of 10-20 nodes almost entirely from dumpster-diving... No word on how reliable or power-efficient it was, though

Anyway, I'm way off topic. Sorry

roadfix

That white, hard-covered wheel-building book.

waterrockets 

Do you lace a Beowulf cluster leading or trailing first?

JeanCoutu

About 15ish years ago I read a book from the 70's called "fix your bicycle". In it was a crude section on wheelbuilding, the info you can get on the net for free is a lot better. I first used the knowledge in that book on my own bike, then on parts found in the trash. Built franken bikes and mostly ran them to the ground, or gave them to my buddies. My first wheels didn't last very long, but by now I don't want other people to build wheels for me.

smurf hunter

I was way off topic and that is what I meant.

AKTed

Well, I personally found the Gerd Schraner book the most helpful when I built my first wheels. I used Sheldon's info in conjunction with Gerd's book, and throughly enjoyed the satisfaction of building a set of wheels! But it is sort of addictive. I'm constantly looking for some excuse to build up another wheelset.

moxfyre

Hehehe. I'm starting to think we need a forum for "bike-related threads that may devolve into computer geek fests." It's fun to talk about JUST bikes or JUST computers... but even better to make random jumps among them

trich

I am just now finishing up a clinic my local REI is putting on. We did a night of "theory" and selecting the components we wanted to build a wheel out of. Then, we did a day to go over more theory and to actually build the front wheel. The final day is the rear wheel.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I find it easier to learn with help than to read a book and do it myself. I don't know if other REIs or LBSs do similar clinics, but it was the way to go for me.

However, now that I have the hunger to build wheels, I'm going to have to figure out how to satisfy it without buying $400 worth of truing stands, spoke wrenches, tensionometers, etc...

DiabloScott

Many years ago, when the Earth and I were young, Bicycling Magazine had useful articles. I want to say this was from ~1984. It's only one way to lace - mirror image, pulling spokes away from derailleur - probably the best and most traditional. I saved this article for a long time and it had grease and Spoke Prep all over it until I finally bought a scanner.



Other pages and much more HERE

Wil Davis

I'll second AKTed's comment about Gerd Schraner's book. It has the most logical set of instructions for lacing (radial (x0), x1, x2, x3, x4) that I've ever seen, and the neatest thing about "The Schraner Way" is that even if interrupted, the builder can easily work out the next step without having to start over; logical, and the easiest way to lace bar none!

- Wil

moxfyre

Wow! That's truly amazing. I was wondering when and how it turned into a content-free fashion and dieting magazine.

All I want is bike technology, bike reviews, and ride reviews. I canceled my Bicycling Mag subscription after realizing that there were 5 pages in each issue for me.