By Mike Tierney The sporting bicycle rider, when it comes to wheels and tires, is faced with this decision. And like many bike-related decisions, this one also seems to have been foisted on us by the bicycle industry. It doesn’t take much of a skeptic to realize that the bike industry’s needs don’t always align…
By Mike Tierney In Part 1 of this “basics” series, I touched on the topics of wheel concentricity, thread lubrication, nipple seat lubrication and spoke length calculators. Today, I’ll cover spoke twist and stress relief. Spoke Twist, or Wind-Up The phenomenon that we have to be very aware of when tensioning and truing wheels is…
By Mike Tierney To properly build wheels, we need to understand basic concepts of mechanics and how they relate to our bike wheels. We need to have a firm grasp on how screw threads work in relation to nipples and spokes; we need to know how to combat friction, and the mechanics of what it…
By Mike Tierney Over the years I’ve found that a beginner’s stumbling block to home wheel building and maintenance is often the lack of equipment, and the expense of that equipment. Really, though, these “issues” are more perception than reality. In short, it’s possible to effectively work on wheels with a minimum of special tools….
By Mike Tierney Why should we even bother with wheel tinkering at all? Why not just take them to the local shop for a fix when needed? And with so many factory pre-built wheelsets on the market, why would we go to the trouble of building wheels ourselves? After all, isn’t wheel building the most…
