Reinventing the Wheel

In this blog as in my life I find myself bored with all the things I ought to be doing, or at least those things that seem to be relevant and/or topical. Whether it is out of need, desire, lunacy, or sheer distraction I've taken it upon myself to build a road bike (bicycle not motorcycle). I have a bike but it is old and there is not much I can do to mitigate its faults. It's hard to repair or update but it does function quite well since a recent overhaul. Nevertheless, a new bike 'seemed' like a good idea. Building it myself also seemed like a good idea; it would help me better understand my bike as well as learn all the maintenance tricks to keep it going smoothly. At any rate, I've started at the most basic level and begun with the wheels. My experience building the wheels (yes I built them) looks like a precursor to building my bike and so should provide interesting entertainment to anyone who cares to read about it. So I decided I'd keep an online journal of this experience...

I think to most people the idea of building a wheel seems rather odd- almost a bit like reinventing the wheel. And I can assure you that in building those things it has felt a little like inventing them. The process began a couple of weeks back when I started to look for the hubs on eBay. The hubs are the centre of the wheel where the axel is located and where the spokes attach. It took a week or more before I figured out how to buy anything on eBay. I was constantly outbid- often in the last 30 seconds or so of the auction. The first hub I bid on was quite nice but it required an expensive cassette (the cogs that the chain connects to that allows one to pedal and move the bike forward). I managed to find a matching cassette at a decent price whose auction ended a half hour after the hub. With ten minutes left and with the highest bid I thought putting a bid in for the cassette was a safe bet. Of course, at the last minute I lost the bid for the hub and I was left with the high bid on a now useless cassette that, if I won, would require finding a matching and expensive hub! Fortunately, I lost that bid too. It would be another week before I managed to win the hubs I wanted- a pair of campognolo chorus hubs.

So now hubs in hand I had to get the rims (the actual round part of the wheel where the tire and tube are placed). These, I was advised, were better purchased at a local shop along with the necessary spokes because shipping them can lead to damage. For whatever reason I managed to buy some of the nicest rims available. I mean really nice rims- mavic open pro. I won't divulge the price but let's say that the total price for the wheels ended up being 3 times what I had originally planned! At any rate, I got my rims and spokes and headed home to build the wheels.


Now if you look at a wheel it looks like it would be a nightmare to build what with all the criss-crossing spokes. It is, however, not terribly hard if you pay attention, which I did not. The first problem did not arise until after I had managed to get all the spokes in and in order but with none of them firmly in place and tightened. It was at this point that I began to wonder what the guy at the shop meant by 'drive' side spokes. I knew that the trailing spokes are sometimes called the drive spokes but I couldn't think of why they would need to be a separate set of spokes. That is when it hit me. The drive side is the side with the cogs and all the spokes on that side are shorter (by a few millimeters) to compensate for the off-centre balance of the lengthier axel on this side. So, in short, I had split all the short spokes up onto different sides. This had to be undone.

At this point a beer or two seemed in order. After that I figured I could simply remove the spokes from one side and move them to the other without taking apart all that I had done. This idea fell apart as quickly as the wheel did. So back to square one. At this point, though, I was slightly, erm, less clear headed due to the beer and I made some basic mistakes. The first mistake was putting the spokes on the outside rather than inside of the hub. This I caught when the first 16 spokes were in place. No biggy, it was easy to remove them one by one and re-do them (unlike the first mistake nothing had been laced so no spokes were in the way). It was time consuming and annoying but not a major fix. After that, and a couple of beers, I started with the last spokes that are 'woven' in between and over the existing spokes to add strength.

After the last of the right spokes was about to be put in I noticed that the spokes were crossing in front of the hole where the tire is inflated, which it's not supposed to do. It occurred to me at that point that maybe I had started with the wrong spoke holes and would, again, need to re-do the wheel! At that point I quit for the night. This was probably a smart move as in the morning I realised that I had merely twisted the hub in the wrong direction (counter clock-wise instead of clockwise), which resulted in the skewed spokes. That was an easy fix.

In the end it took 3 days or more to build and true (tighten the wheel so that it is as close to perfectly round- laterally and radially- as possible) both of the wheels. But if there is one thing I now know it is how to build a damn wheel! My next adventure will be in finding a bike frame and gathering all the remaining parts. At this rate the bike should be put together just in time to store it for next winter....