I mean; I build my own wheels, and have built wheels for friends at cost...no charge for my labor, save for maybe some beers. Fairly recently a friend asked me to build him a basic Open Pro/105 wheel set, and I had to tell my buddy that he would actually do better buying from Performance. I couldn't source the parts alone for as cheap as Performance was selling the built up wheelset.

How on earth do wheel builders turn any profit at all?

sweat shops with lot of truing stands.

As Uncle Benny used to say "Buy Wholesale, Sell Retail my son".

...we live in the age when the built up wheelset from an online seller
is available cheaper than you can buy the individual parts, primarily because
of economies of scale and the invention of the wheel assembly machines that
tension everything simultaneously.

Machine built wheels are a nice starting point, but so far do not approach
what you are able to do yourself in tensioning evenly at the higher tensions
required for a durable wheel. Also, I'm pretty sure they don't stress relieve 'em.


So I guess maybe you could make a side income tensioning and relieving machine
built wheels for folks who want them to function well and last longer.

And some guys really do want wheels built to order that you cannot buy prebuilt.


Buy otherwise, I think you are correct. It's not something I'd try to do for a living.

You can get really good deals on parts if you buy them by the thousands or tens of thousands. Pay your workers a nickel a wheel and you are in the money.

The economics of it was something I hadn't ever really thought about. I build as a hobby, and I'm really good at it (that's why my friends ride my wheels!), but I'd never considered it as a living.

It was rather eye opening to find that I can't buy parts as inexpensively as some outfits sell built wheels.

One of my friends had recently suggested that I start a side business building wheels, and I almost spit out my coffee laughing. But it also made me think that there actually are guys who build for a living (or part of it) and I couldn't get my brain around how that would even work.

+1
Here's a post of mine recounting my experience with a machine built wheel-set.

"I thought it might be useful for anyone contemplating buying wheels from Rose to post my experience of this wheel-set: "Xtreme airline 4 / Shimano Tiagra" which sells at Ł87.59 plus Ł6 postage.
https://www.rosebikes.co.uk/article/road ... aid:202991

These did look very good value and I bought the 700c version which I thought would be adequate for my Winter bike. These were delivered within a couple of weeks and communication was good throughout.

The wheels appeared to be sturdy and reasonably well-made and the rims (I believe these are made by Rose) seemed to be rigid without being too heavy.
Out of the box the front wheel had the overhaul tension of the spokes well within the acceptable limits and the tensions were even and needed no adjustment. After de-stressing it needed only minimal adjustment to bring the lateral deviation to less than 1mm. Radial deviation was acceptable.

Rear wheel had uneven spoke tensions which were out-with the limits and had reverse dishing which would have caused problems in obtaining all gears if fitted in the original condition. After evening-out the spoke tensions and applying the correct dishing, the wheel was de-stressed and acceptable tensions achieved on the drive and non-drive sides. Both rims required the join to be smoothed with a sharpening stone but this is usual with these cheaper rims. Hub bearings were smooth and properly adjusted.

Given these wheels use Tiagra hubs and DT Competition spokes I view them as good value, but clearly they had never been de-stressed which would cause future problems. I'm aware that these are machine-made wheels but I am led to believe that the latest wheel-building machines could perform this function.
Altogether I'm happy with my purchase and see these as good value.
All tensions were checked using a Park Spoke tension meter."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXIkj0-4LSA

Some of my wheels I've built myself, some I've had built. I haven't purchased any built wheels in many years. I always want something that just isn't available in a built wheel. Wheel builders make money by being extremely competent and charging for their labor. Having built my own wheels, I'm astounded at how fast they can do it. I suppose by the 50th wheel I'd built that week, I'd be some faster, too.

Built wheels that I've purchased from large companies were just fine, though. No complaints. They held up as well as hand-built.

I've seen similar wheel building machine videos and, yes, they can and do stress relieve the spokes.

I've got two "factory built" wheel sets from Shimano, WH-R560 105-level wheels and WH-R501 probably about Sora level. Both came completely true, evenly tensioned and have been totally satisfactory and the prices were extremely attractive at about $200 and $130 for the pairs. The R-560's now have 15,000 miles on the and have needed absolutely no attention. The R501's are only about 1500 miles old so it's way to early to tell but so far so good.

Wheel building machines unfairly get a bad rap here on the forum.

Fact is that machines are capable of producing very true, very evenly tensioned, tight wheels. There are also machines, or separate work stations that stress relieve.

The issue is that greater precision increases the cycle times for the machines, and features like stress relieving mean more capital outlay, and more time per wheel. So it isn't a question of machine vs no machine, or machine with human final touch up, vs handbuilt, but one of the total cycle time (and cost) the wheel building company is willing to live with.

Fortunately for hand builders many sellers of production wheels opt for higher volume/lower cost, and are willing to sell fairly crappy wheels to be more price competitive, giving production wheels a bad name.

This opens up opportunities for hand builders to market better quality, or the ability to build unique or different wheels that production builders can't. Another important part of selling hand built wheels is the ability to advise in component selection, so your client can get a wheel suited to his exact needs.

However to be competitive and make money building wheels, you have to buy components at the right price, and be able to build a quality wheel in about a half an hour or less. Good productive hand builders can build wheels at a rate of 3 per hour or so.

I don't believe Peter White is operating a sweat shop, in fact he does all of his builds and does so in America. Look man a retail business entitles the person holding the retail license to get items, in this case rims, spokes, nipples, etc at a lower cost, usually close to 50% off but that depends on what is being purchased. There are certain retail sales that have a much higher percentage off, but lets just keep it in the bicycle world. You have to then figure out how much to charge for the finish wheel plus labor to make a profit after expenses to be able to live on.

I think that's why Peter White went from using DT spokes to Wheelsmith because DT was charging to much on the wholesale end so he was able to get Wheelsmith spokes cheaper and still have just as good of a product. However Peter White sells other stuff besides wheels, which leads me to believe that just selling custom wheels alone was not making him enough money to stay in business. I have a set of Peter White wheels and I can tell you those are the best wheels in terms of durability that I have ever owned and he backs them with a lifetime warranty against spoke breakage (not from accidents) and truing, I have yet to send them in for truing after 6 years. Of course I don't live near him so to send a set of wheels to him to be trued would cost more than just taking into an LBS, usually I true my own wheels, but the point is he makes them so good I haven't had to even tweak them in the slightest bit. Peter White's prices were not that much higher than having my LBS build a set, but my LBS would have never built as good of a wheel.

So if you were to start a business selling custom built wheels you need to sell some other items, and you need to back the wheels with a iron clad warranty and service otherwise your business will go poof. Read Peter Whites website if you're still tossing the idea around, you can learn a lot by what he says and does.

A good wheelbuilder loses money on every set but makes up for it in volume

Another source for excellent semi-hand built wheel is Colorado Cyclist. They machine build and hand finish their wheels and, of course, buy in more than enough quantity to get low wholesale prices on components.

On another bike (not the ones with Shimano wheels mentioned above) I have a set of CC built wheels with Campy chorus hubs, CXP-33 rims and DT 2/1.8/2 spokes 32H, 3X. these have just over 25,000 miles on them and, like the Shimano wheels I mentioned, have never needed any attention at all.

That makes no sense, if he's losing money on every wheel he builds than it doesn't matter how many wheels he makes he's still losing money. If a wheel builder is making money but the profit margin is slim then volume building would make up for that assuming the person is well enough known that he can sell enough to do that. Personally I think if a wheel builder is well known they can get away with charging more for their wheels and not do quite as much volume and be happy.

You need to have your irony detector recalibrated.

Properly built (likely at least hand-finished, although Holland Mechanics does make a stress-relieving machine) wheels never break spokes (for at least the first 300,000 miles can be over 10X as long as it takes to wear out a rim's brake tracks) and don't go out of true unless you hit something hard enough to bend the rim.

Machine built wheels under a heavy rider sometimes have fatigue failures after a few thousand miles and may not stay straight for the first few hundred. While theoretically a shop could make them right before sending them out the door and doing so is not hard that usually does not happen.

So, people who know better and can afford it are often willing to pay a wheel builder hundreds of dollars extra for the same parts.

prowheelbuilder.com gets $90 in labor per wheel plus parts. My incompetent LBS gets $70. Peter doesn't live in California with expensive shop space.

Custom also gives you more options, like velocity rims with color options seemingly as plentiful as a box of Crayola crayons.

I think you're using the wrong gague, what he needs to recalibrate is his sarcasm tensionometer...

I was looking into wheel building machines (cause I'm a huge nerd) and I wondered if it were possible to find out which sort of machine a company has. If they have the latest thing I'd thik they would want to advertise it.

Also it was clear that the programming of the machine and how many "passes" it makes before finished were important to the final product.

In one of the articles about the company in Holland that makes wheel machines it mentioned that it was formerly done by prisoners. Skilled artisans no doubt...

It's a really old joke. You guys need to lighten up a little.

...............I just love this video, and it hasn't been linked for a while now.
FF to about 13:20 for the wheel building process. Note the employees who do it.

Haven't you ever heard that car sales line before? It was a joke I made

....wow. Thanks for the link.

Isn't suggesting someone have his irony detector recalibrated light enough.

You got the joke -- I had other people in mind for lightening up. Things get serious in a hurry on this forum.