Cosidering building myself a road fixed wheel starting with the hubs in the on one sale. What else apart from spokes and a rim is essential? The wheel isn’t going to be dished but how do I ensure it doesn’t fall apart in a week? Will a spoke key and guess work get me through?

You need:

A wheel building guide http://sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html
A guide to measuring hubs and rims http://www.sheldonbrown.com/rinard/spocalc.htm
An online spoke length calculator http://www.dtswiss.com/SpokesCalc/Welcome.aspx?language=en
A spoke key
A rubber band and a pencil to use as a truing guide with the wheel in your trackend/fork
Drop of oil to help nipple move
EDIT: and a match stick for starting the nipple off on the threads.

Then you need to buy
Hubs
Rim
enough spokes which should come with 12mm brass nipples
2x rolls of rim tape – I like Velox cloth tape, make sure you get the right width for your rims (couple of mm narrower than the bead width)

Then you need deep pockets because when you get the taste for it you start building wheels for no reason at all 🙂
Just built one today in fact…my 9th or 10th in 6 months I think. . .

Stoner that reply is awesome. Many thanks!

what he said ^

the wheelpro book is very good and tells yuo how to build your own truing stand from mdf for very little

http://www.wheelpro.co.uk

Great answer Stoner. I’ve often considered trying to do a wheel build, but when you price up decent hubs, decent rims, decent spokes etc., is it cost effective or is it the satisfaction of doing it yourself ?

To add to what Stoner said (great post BTW), stick to brass nipples. Ally nipples really are for the pros only (too easy to round off, absolute bastard to build with to get any real tension with), wheelbuilders and XC riders that is. Stick with brass nipples for reliability and ease of build.

Also, use some wet lube (chain lube) to lube the nipple threads. Just a dab in each nipple, but this significantly reduces the spoke wind up during the build.

When you’re building, and you’re happy you’ve laced the wheel correctly, concentrate first on applying relatively equal tension on each spoke. Best way is to wind each nipple on so that the thread on the spoke just disappears. Once you’ve done them all, add 2 full turns on each nipple. Then see where you’re at. If they’re all still very loose, add another 2 full turns on each. If they’re not so loose, add 1 turn. Then just keep going until you’re somewhere near having a round(ish) wheel with relatively even spoke tensions.

It all gets a bit more complicated from here on in, but it’s only simple mechanics. If a wheel wobbles one way, put tension on a spoke (or spokes) to pull it the other.

Simple Really!

Anybody tell me what wheel builders charge ?

its normally about £30 a wheel including bog standard spokes and nipples. I used the Sheldon Brown website on wheel building and also this link was very handy for the lacing up. I just build my set of Disc Cyclocross wheels up and they are some of the best wheels I have ever had. Really great to learn how to build them too. I got them perfectly true and round. I have hammered them over the last month and the spokes are as solid as when first laced. Most of the wheels I have had built in the past onbly seemed to last a few month and all the spokes were loose and needed major tension adding.

A good tip someone on here gave me is to use an old cut down spoke with a nipple on and some blue tack to hold it to the frame and fork. You can get very fine adjustment on the truing by just turning the nipple a little and hearing the nipple scrape the rim. You can then fine tune the spoke tension to get a near perfect wheel. This is basically a truing stand using this method and is much much beter than lolly sticks or pencils etc.

To be honest I though wheels building was tabboo until I built my wheels. It is no more harder than changing a bottom bracket etc. Maybe it takes a bit more research than a lot of other bike jobs. The wheelpro spoke calculator is very good also. The correct spoke length is very important!

null

Right, I just ordered 4 hubs. All I need now is everything else on the list!

If you get stuck just ask on here as I found good advice on here.

2nd for the Wheelpro book – all you need in one PDF and for £9 it’s a bargin. Roger is pretty damn helpful too – for silly additional questions that you come up with during a build!

Old timer – Member
Great answer Stoner. I’ve often considered trying to do a wheel build, but when you price up decent hubs, decent rims, decent spokes etc., is it cost effective or is it the satisfaction of doing it yourself ?

I recently did my first wheel build.
I got hold of cheap brand new rear Hope Bulb hub so thought I’d give it a go, and with the help of the Wheelpro book it was easy.

I was going to build a matching front wheel, but I priced up the hub (Pro2), rim (XM719) and spokes (DT DB black) and it was around £20 cheaper to get a built wheel from CRC.

It was rewarding to build a wheel myself but cheaper to get someone else to do it.

mboy – I wouldnt put oil on the spoke threads as once it’s there it stays in there lubrictaing the thread and potentially helping it to unwind in use. Better to put the drop of oil on the outside of the nipple where it pokes out of the eyelet/rim so that the nipple is free to rotate in the rim. Deal with wind up by over-rotating and then backing off, say, 1.4 a turn.

I then use nipplelock (a wet threadlock by loctite) on mine after its all trued and destressed just as a back up. Of course a master wheel builder wouldnt need threadlock at all but for the sake of a few drops for some peace of mind.

Im sure the wheelpro book is fine, and someone like wheelpro who’s life and job is building wheels is going to have lots of subtle extra knowledge about the subject, but at £9 for what’s mainly already in the public domain I think it just adds to the “mystique” around wheelbuilding which is undeserved. e.g. seth’s To be honest I though wheels building was tabboo until I built my wheels..

as Simon says, building your own wheel from new parts is almost never economical.

building new wheels from second hand parts is much more cost effective.

You also get to build wheels that you cant get cheaply from Merlin or CRC such as a Salsa Gordo on a Superstart Components 20mm hub I built a couple of weeks ago.

Simon-definitely satisfying, definitely not cost effective. I regularly get asked to quote for a wheel build, write both trade and retail prices for the parts involved(no labour charge added), and usually the response on seeing the retail price is “I’ve seen them on the ‘net for X price”. When you compare it with the trade price, i’d stand to make about £3 on parts minus the cost of about an hour labour.

If CRC had been able to build 29er wheels I would have bought from them abd it would have been cheaper for a full build or maybe even the same at worse. I got both the rims from ebay brand new for £7, rims which are £60 from the shop. So I saved a packet in the end. With the spokes, labour rims, and hubs, I saved about £100 in all on the cheapest quote for the exact same build I did. CRC should get with the times and start building 29er wheels. They say they have not got the right spoke lengths! Is it so hard to order longer lengths of spokes! CRC wheel builds are poor I have found and if you can learn how to build your own wheels, then you should have a much better set of wheels, than what CRC will send you. obviously Merling and a few other wheel builders turn out very well made wheels.

It’s possible to radially re-true wheels by staring at the rim as it goes past the brake blocks i discovered a while ago,but it can leave you feeling like you’ve got a funny stare for a while after you’ve finished.