Building bicycle wheels is one of those things which is often seen as black magic by people who have never done it before. The perceived complication starts with component choice. When you buy a pre-built wheel, the manufacturer or wheel builder chooses the hub, rim, and spokes for you; but when you build your own, the choice is yours, and this can be extremely overwhelming. How do you know if your rim is going to be strong enough, or work with the tires you want to use? How do you know which hub goes with which rim? Perhaps most confusingly of all, how do you know which spokes to use, not to mention how many and how to lace them? With so many different styles, gauges, and potential lacing patterns, the possibilities are virtually limitless. How do you know what goes with what, and how do you put it all together to build a functional wheel?
The myth that wheelbuilding is difficult is sometimes perpetuated by custom wheel builders who will, for instance, overstate the importance of spoke tension, claim that their wheels are true to impossibly accurate tolerances, or over-complexify component selection. The truth is that wheelbuilding doesn’t depend on some sort of mysterious knowledge or skills base which is only available to the select few people who are ‘in the know’. Instead, it is a lot like knitting or weaving: while it might look difficult at first, it basically depends on following a pattern, which means that anyone can do it as long as you can follow directions and work with an acute eye to detail. Building a wheel successfully doesn’t even require fancy tools – sure, truing stands and dishing gauges make the process easier, but it is perfectly possible to build a wheel of the same quality using nothing more than a bicycle frame, a couple of 2×4’s and some coins.
In this series of articles, I am going to dispel some of the mystique surrounding wheel building. I’m going to explain the entire process from start to finish in an accessible and easy-to-understand way, but for those who would like to learn more I am also going to explore some of the nuances and technical details in more depth. I’ll start with component selection, where I’ll focus on the most versatile options to try to help distill the overwhelming number of options down to what ‘simply works’ for most builds, but also explain where it might pay to deviate from typical choices for certain advanced or unique wheel builds. I’ll also discuss spoke count and lacing pattern, because after component selection this is where you, as a wheel builder, have the most control over the design of your finished wheel – but as we’ll see this is also something which affects the performance of a wheel much less than you might think.
Next we’ll explore the issue of how the hubs should be laced in-depth, specifically whether trailing spokes should be laced on the inside or outside of the hub flanges – and how this varies between the drive and non-drive side, front and rear hubs, and hub (disc) vs rim brake wheels. After discussing basic wheelbuilding theory, we’ll get into how to actually build a wheel, essentially following the Sheldon Brown method, but explaining some of the nuances and how some of the minor lacing choices affect the wheel build in more depth. This will include a discussion about rim handedness, how rim handedness and the placement of the key spoke affect the spoke pattern around the valve hole, and how different lacing patterns affect the position of the hub logos. Finally, I’ll explain how I tension and true a newly built wheel, including how to stress relieve a wheel, how to judge the correct tension without a spoke tension meter, and how a wheel can be trued using both standard shop tools as well as improvised tools.
As of the writing of this article I have built around 8 wheels of different types, and I have done a lot of research and experimentation to build my knowledge, so what I am going to present here is based on my current understanding of how wheel building works. My aim is to make basic wheel building concepts accessible and understandable, but I don’t claim to be a wheel building expert. If you follow my guide, you should end up being able to build a wheel for almost any purpose using a variety of lacing patterns, and while I am going to point out where it might be worth deviating from ‘standard practice’, it is up to you to research any advanced topics in detail and make sure that your design is going to fit your intended use case.