I broke a spoke . It cost £50 to be replaced.
Now another one has gone in the same wheel.
I also have another wheel that needs a true.
Where can I go to learn how to change a spoke and true it?
Online is no use as I will need proper hands on tuition.
Once I have learnt this dark art will I need lots of tech or just old forks in a vice?

Are you looking to save money or learn a new skill ?

Sounds to me like he’s looking to spend money. Otherwise I’d recommend YouTube 😉

I don’t want to sound like a salty old man but long before youtube or even internet access this is the kind of thing I learned to do when I was a kid. I used to mess around in the garage just figuring things out.

Replacing individual spokes is very easy. With youtube holding your hand you can’t go wrong.

If you’ve got multiple spokes snapping in the same wheel they might not be great quality and have started to go brittle. You’ll end up just chasing broken spokes until they’re all gone.

Not the answer you want but Ali Clarkson’s YouTube videos on building wheels make it so simple! And if you want to go really in depth, get a copy of Roger Musson’s wheel building guide.

If I’d done a class I’d have forgotten half of it by the next time I built wheels again. I mean worse case scenario is you watch them for free and then decide you want to do a class anyway.

I’ve now built 6 sets from watching and reading these. A good spoke key and I find a spoke tension meter helps take the guess work out – although people argue you can just pluck them.

Once I have learnt this dark art will I need lots of tech or just old forks in a vice?

Neither, just turn your bike upside down. Building a whole wheel can be a faff, but replacing spokes or truing a wonky wheel in the frame/forks is fine.

I’m not aware of any wheel building courses on their own. Maybe one of the Cytech overall bike mechanic courses might cover it?

I learned using the Sheldon Brown online wheel guide and just gave it a go. There’s nothing mystical about it – it’s being logical and just having a think about what needs doing next.

Wheel building you can literally follow step by step instructions from the website and lace the wheel. I’d say that’s the easiest bit.

Getting a wheel round / true side to side and all even tensions does take a bit of practice. The more you practice the quicker it gets.

Replacing a spoke is pretty easy – you can see the pattern of the other spokes to work out the route it takes. Just pop it in and tension it up so it’s not loose – then see how true the wheel is – the lower the spoke count the more out of true one spoke snapping will have made it go. 32 spoke – it probably won’t have made much difference. 24 spoke or less it will probably have gone fairly wildly out of true in my experience.

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html

Seeing it as a dark art is the first mistake. It really is a very easy process with some straight forward methodical steps to follow.

It’s very easy to overthink almost every aspect of wheel building / repairing. I learnt myself and have built wheels for all of my bikes that have stayed true and round for over 20 years now. I think I last bought whole wheels in about 2011 because the cost of a pair of Hope Hoops had dropped below the cost of the parts to make them in a flash sale of some sort. the only build I’ve struggled with was the latest one I did, which used straight pull spokes. I couldn’t find measurements for the flanges on either hub and got one wheel’s spokes out by about 1-2mm. Expensive and annoying mistake, that one.
As above, have a look at the Sheldon Brown web site and give it a go. One other thought: if you have a good local bike shop that you’re a regular at, you might also see if their resident wheel builder (There’s usually at least one who really enjoys it) you could always ask if they’d fancy doing a bit of paid tuition. Don’t lowball them, and do provide tea and cake.

I learned with this book: https://www.wheelpro.co.uk/wheelbuilding/book.php
I’ve built around 5-6 wheels following the method in that book, haven’t had a problem with any of them yet.

Seeing it as a dark art is the first mistake

This. If you have the patience to follow the procedure carefully, it starts to look a lot less like a dark art. Spokes and rims obey the same laws of physics as everything else 🙂

IMO the most difficult thing about building a wheel is knowing where “close enough” is – you can end up chasing the perfect wheel for hours with no real improvement in the end product.

To answer the original question, this is a wheel building course…

http://www.ryanbuildswheels.co.uk/classes-return-introducing-wheelbuilding-weekenders/

Mr S.Attack that’s exactly what I need.
I could put my good rims on my good hubs.

Not exactly Epsom, however I did a wheel building course in 21 with Cycle Training Wales in Cardiff.
Just three of us, not rushed and great instruction. Lots of tea, questions asked and answered.

Waste of money ….

Building a decent (better than machine made) NEW rim with new spokes is as others have said dead easy…
I’d totally recommend the Ali Clarkeson vids above.

Truing one with a stressed rim is much harder to get “pretty decent” or at least takes more skill and practice.

The difference between a decent (better than machine made) and proper professional wheels is 95% practice there aren’t “secrets” you’ll learn on a training course you won’t see on Ali’s videos.

My wheels are not as nice as pro wheels but I don’t do it as often or have special tools (other than homemade dishing tool from bits of waste pipe)

It cost £50 to be replaced

Wheel building aside, which surrey bike shop charged you that to replace a broken spoke?

Not the answer you want but Ali Clarkson’s YouTube videos on building wheels make it so simple! And if you want to go really in depth, get a copy of Roger Musson’s wheel building guide.

This.

If I’m building a wheel, I’ll stick Ali’s video on to get the key spoke right (I can never remember which way) and then its easy. Think I’m in at something like my 20th wheel with Ali’s method.
I don’t chase the last 10th of a mm, I think if you start doing that there is a fine line of making the build weaker.

For me its always Sapim spokes, DT Squorx nipples. Majority of wheels I’ve built have been DT rims, I’ve become familiar how they come up to tension. I dish mine in the wheel stand, flipping the wheel 180 till it sits in the middle, then bring the tension up to spec.

Another recommendation for the Ali Clarkson videos from me. I usually prefer hands on training but I found his videos great for learning to build wheels.

It’s quite therapeutic/relaxing bringing the truing stand into the warm house and lacing up a wheel on the dining room table or on the sofa.

The secret to wheel building is, disk brakes. Building a perfectly round, perfectly true, well tensioned wheel wasn’t easy. Most of the time you’d sacrifice the overall strength of the build for the accuracy that it needed. But building a somewhat round, more or less true, well tensioned wheel is far far easier and most people will end up building a stronger wheel because they’re not sacrificing anything for the last little bit of runout.

Anyway- it genuinely isn’t hard, not really. If you think of it as maths, then yep it’s a very complex system. If you think of it as individual spokes and pairs, it’s basically 2 people pulling on a rope.