Building A Bicycle Wheel In Ten Easy Steps

People fear wheel-building. None more so than tour­ing cyc­lists. Nobody, apart from a tiny elite of skilled crafts­men in scattered bike shops across the world, should dare impinge on this secret­ive world of mech­an­ical artistry.

But we all have a capa­city for art, don’t we? Could it really be all that dif­fi­cult? I had a new rim to fit to Tenny’s bike, which would involve tak­ing apart the rear wheel in its entirety and rebuild­ing it from scratch. So I decided to find out what this wheel-building malar­key was all about. After four and a half hours of care­ful labour, I held in my hands what appeared to be a nice straight new wheel.

I’m a firm believer in the Do-It-Yourself ethic. Turn­ing your hand to a new skill is a great way to blow away a few psy­cho­lo­gical cob­webs. I didn’t find build­ing this wheel par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult, but I appre­ci­ate that exper­i­ence brings an appre­ci­ation of subtlties that I prob­ably over­looked as a begin­ner, which is why there will always be room for spe­cial­ist pro­fes­sions. I also had a fant­astic teacher in the form of the late Shel­don Brown, whose gold­mine of a site I’d recom­mend for all sorts of bicycle-related tech­nic­al­it­ies. I haven’t for­got­ten that the wheel has yet to stand the test of time!

But without fur­ther ado, here’s a very con­densed sum­mary of how to build a (36-spoke rear) bicycle wheel for the unini­ti­ated, scared, and specialist-equipment-less, as I was this time yesterday:

Step 1: Gather everything you need — hub, spokes, nipples, rim, screw­driver, spoke wrench, ruler, upside-down bike frame (tru­ing stands, dish sticks and ten­siono­met­ers are for the lux­uri­ant and pro­fes­sional only). The terms front, back, left and right are all rel­at­ive to the bike itself.

Step 2: There are four groups of spokes — left-side, right-side (freewheel-side), back-angled (trail­ing), and front-angled (lead­ing). You’re going to put in all the freewheel-side trail­ing spokes, so grab the hub with the free­wheel body towards you, and insert 9 spokes in altern­ate holes on the free­wheel side of the hub. Insert from the out­side so the spokes run from the inside of the holes (the parts with the holes are called flanges).

Step 3: Grab the rim with the label facing towards you. Look at the holes. They altern­ate sides rather than being centred. Find the first hole on your side to the right of the valve hole. Insert a spoke and screw on the nipple two or three turns. Now grab the spoke to the right and attach it four rim-holes to the right so there are 3 empty rim-holes between this and the pre­vi­ous spoke. Repeat for all nine spokes, then check the spacing.

Step 4: Spin the wheel around and do the same in mirror-image for the left side. Each spoke should run from the flange hole just in front of the occu­pied one the right side, and run to the rim hole dir­ectly in front of the cor­res­pond­ing occu­pied one. Do this for all nine spokes. Grab the hub and rotate it for­ward a little. The spokes should go taut, giv­ing you an idea of their final pos­i­tion and angle in the fin­ished wheel. Look­ing from the side, no spokes should cross each other at this point.

Step 5: Hold the wheel with the free­wheel towards you again. You’re going to put in the nine lead­ing spokes on this side. Each spoke should cross three of the exist­ing spokes on this side. Insert the spoke from the inside of the flange this time, then run it for­ward on the out­side of two exist­ing spokes and behind a third. Attach to the rim at the next avail­able freewheel-side hold. Check, double-check and triple check the pattern.

Step 6: Repeat in mirror-image for the left side of the wheel. There will now only be one set of holes avail­able in the rim, so you can’t go wrong. Check, double check and triple check the spoke pat­tern. Don’t get it wrong. You’ve now done the easy part. Congratulations.

Step 7: Screw on all the nipples so that the threads just dis­ap­pear. You can do this with your fin­gers. The idea is to get all of the spokes at the same very mod­er­ate ten­sion. If the wheel is still very floppy after this, tighten each nipple another turn. Then put the wheel in the frame, spin it, and mar­vel at how wobbly and off-centre it is.

Step 8: You need to do three things now — get it straight, centred, tight. Tight­ness (or ten­sion) will hap­pen auto­mat­ic­ally as you straighten (true) and centre (dish) the wheel, because you’ll be tight­en­ing spokes to do this. The rim will wobble side to side and up and down. Use the ruler to brush against the rim as you spin the wheel to identify where the wobbles are, and fix whichever is worst at any one time. Pull a sec­tion of the rim towards one side by tight­en­ing spokes on that side with the spoke wrench whilst loosen­ing spokes on the other. To cor­rect ver­tical straight­ness, find the lumps and tighten spokes equally on both sides. Keep doing this until the wheel is pretty straight both lat­er­ally and ver­tic­ally to within a couple of mil­li­metres. The spokes should now be quite a bit tighter than before.

Step 9: If it’s a rear wheel, it might be straight-ish, but it won’t be centred, because the pres­ence of the free­wheel moves the hub flanges over to the left side. This means you need to pull the whole rim over the the right a little to com­pensate. Do this by tight­en­ing all the right-side (freewheel-side) spokes equally. Start and fin­ish at the valve hole so you don’t for­get where you star­ted. Meas­ure the dis­tance from each side of the rim to the frame of the bike so you know when you’re nearly there. Once it’s centred, true the wheel again. I know, I know — it takes ages. But the effort is worth it.

Step 10: Now you should have a pretty straight and centred wheel, but the spokes might be a bit loose. Get another wheel and ‘twang’ the spokes. Listen to the note and com­pare it with the twang from your new wheel — the free­wheel side will be higher in pitch, which is nor­mal. Now tighten all spokes equally, maybe a quarter of a turn each, until the twanging pitch is in the same ball­park as the ref­er­ence wheel. You can also judge ten­sion by squeez­ing pairs of spokes together where they cross. When you’re done, grab groups of four spokes (two from each side) and squeeze them until the spokes stay bent around each other. Keep doing this and true­ing the wheel over and over again until the pinging noises stop and the wheel stays true after the spoke-squeezing. Stick a tyre on it and go. True again after a few rides.

That’s it — bicycle wheel build­ing for dum­mies, based on my exper­i­ence yes­ter­day. Sounds easy, right?! This simple guide will get your wheel built in an emer­gency, but I’m not an author­ity on the sub­ject — this is strictly for begin­ners, by a beginner!

If you have the time and inclin­a­tion and want to learn more and do it thor­oughly, check out the art­icle I read in order to build the wheel prop­erly, and let me know how you get on.

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