Bike Forums - How is it even possible to build wheels like this?

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great video! i always love a good robot movie. i watched the whole thing, more than i can say about about a recent Kurt Russell film.:)

looks like some of those wheels needed a little remedial work after the initial tightening. clever bit of software and hardware going on there, handling all the various rim dimensions and lacing permutations...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Psimet2001 (Post 16506509)

Ever driven a spoke with a power tool?

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...e-I-want-this!

It sounds like I can hear spoke windup once in a while. ??

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brian Ratliff (Post 16506063)

If the rim is stiff enough laterally, you can get a lot of creative spoke tension patterns. They'll all equal out to a "true" wheel, but if you were to measure the strain on the rim, it'd be an irregular wavy pattern. You know how if you break a spoke you can release the tension opposite and increase the tension on that spoke's neighbors to compensate? Same thing, but in spades and across the entire wheel.

This appears to be what is going on. The problem already got worse and I'd swear it translated into noticeably degraded handling through on a high speed descent. I definitely need to do something about it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Psimet2001 (Post 16506509)

Ever driven a spoke with a power tool?

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...e-I-want-this!

The robot is cool, but except on the cheapest wheels, I'm not sure I understand the point. I have other wheelsets that have stayed true for years even getting banged around so trying to get out of paying someone a bit extra to get it right strikes me as false economy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by banerjek (Post 16509390)

the point......... trying to get out of paying someone a bit extra.

That is it.

And then giving them a reason to upgrade.

Quote:

Originally Posted by banerjek (Post 16509390)

...

The robot is cool, but except on the cheapest wheels, I'm not sure I understand the point. I have other wheelsets that have stayed true for years even getting banged around so trying to get out of paying someone a bit extra to get it right strikes me as false economy.

This machine is orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring people to do this job. That machine is doing a wheel every 25-30 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To hand-tension a wheel from scratch, a person will probably take five minutes, which means you need 10 people to get the same throughput working three shifts. At something like minimum wage, that's $10 an hour, for 1680 man-hours/week, or $16,800/week. In one week, that machine pays itself off and most cyclists won't know the difference.

And because it's the consumers and the bike shops that absorb the costs of wheels that don't stay true, the wheel manufacturer has even less incentive to hand-build wheels. Even the wheelsets that are mass-produced but are claimed to be "hand-built" are built on a machine similar than this. It's just that after the machine built step, a person takes 30 seconds to stress relieve the wheel and tweak the spoke tension.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brian Ratliff (Post 16509545)

Even the wheelsets that are mass-produced but are claimed to be "hand-built" are built on a machine similar than this. It's just that after the machine built step, a person takes 30 seconds to stress relieve the wheel and tweak the spoke tension.

This is true, I met the sales reps from the companies that produce these machines. They told me a long list of companies using the equipment and because they were hand finished we could still claim the wheels to be hand built. After talking with them and seeing the machines we decided to change our hand built claim to 100% hand built in-house.