And Sheldon Brown never made me any better.
I need to find a shop with an Anne Sullivan of wheels. I have a pretty deep dish road wheel that mild-mannered shop rats have had mad trouble with.
Randy - formerly at the Trek store - was a genius with truing it, but he's not there any more.
Anybody have a suggestion on a shop that has a kickass wheel-man (or wheel-girl.)
What kinda rim and spokes you got on there?
Deep alloy wheels are usually quite stiff and strong and hard to knock out of true. Once out of true they can be a bear to get straight again.
Maybe it is time for a new rim?
I'd recommend myself, but I' no longer in the wrenching business.
I'm not really any help, huh?
rumour has it trek of pittsburgh rehired a pretty darn good wheel builder/ truer who is not Randy.
We can do that, we have two wheel heads.
5008 Gem way, Behind Kranick's. 412-441-4720
PO, have you ventured to Kraynick's to give it a go yourself? Gerry would be more than happy to assist if need be.
Truing is far from rocket science, and even if you find a shop with a master wheelbuilder, odds are that the young kid will be the one truing your wheel.
Randy is now at Dirty Harry's.
randy is in portland or
a lot of people come into free ride and play around with some of the wheels that are messed up anyway for some practice
If you still can't find someone to true this up I could come out of retirement.
I wonder if the original poster has been back to this thread?
he's actually a friend of mine, and i think he still hasn't gotten his wheels done. i'll send him back here next time i talk to him.
A very old thread about a very old problem that just doesn't want to go away.
My out-of-true wheel count is now five, and I don't have the budget to get this done at any shop, if I could get to one that's open when I'm available.
Somehow I need to figure out how to spend far less time fixing wheels. I don't have entire evenings to spend on transportation maintenance.
What does anyone else do? What tools make this job easy? How long did it take anyone to get good at this? When you finally "got it", what in your head "clicked"?
Lacking all that, who'd be up to helping me true a bunch of wheels?
How out of true are your wheels? Mine is WAAAAY WAAAY out of true, AKA shot and I still manage to get around fine. (I do have disk brakes though, so braking isn't affected)
I use higher spoke counts and bigger tires than I otherwise would. One thing I have not invested in, but keep thinking about, is a tension gauge. Without it, I just make sure I keep my spokes real tight. The only risk there is overdoing it and cracking the rim.
my biggest problem is stripping nipples. are mine just crappy? they tend to strip both tightening and loosening, and the spokes are definitely not so tight as to risk breaking anything.
p.s. i don't think my wrench size is the problem--it fits just right.
HV,It's possible that when your wheel was built they used spokes that didn't go far enough into the nipple, especially if this is happening repeatedly. When you take off your tire and rim strip, can you see the end of the spoke inside the nipple? If the spoke is deep in the opening, it's possible that's the problem. If that is, there's no solution but to re-lace the wheel with better length spokes.
Ideally the end of the spoke should come just flush with the outer end of the nipple.
If that's not the problem, it's possible your wheel was just built with a bad batch. Then, also re-lace.
Stripping nipples while loosening? I've never had that happen, and I can't understand the mechanism.
Edmonds' point is spot-on for the tightening direction. Another way this can happen is if you over-tighten the first spokes while building a wheel. You have to tighten them evenly all the way around the wheel in stages, a bit at a time.
when i said while loosening, i meant in the loosening direction, not that they were already turning then suddenly stripped. and it may have happened after they were stripped in the tightening direction, so they could've been worn already.
i'm actually out of town now and can't check my wheel, but i'm planning on relacing the whole thing anyway. i just want to know if i have to be on guard for crappy nipples.
Hey Stu, you work out by the airport, yeah? Can your wheels to where you work? If so I can pick them up from there and have a go at truing them.
chris at jbvcoaching dot com
I broke two spokes cassette side during the MS150. One at mile 50, and one towards the end.. Mile 50, I secured the spoke, trued it up as best as I could and released the brake a bit. I finished the last 100 miles like this and at some point towards the end I broke another but it wasn't hanging so I didn't notice with the brake released.. That's 3 in in 3 weeks with 850 miles on the bicycle.. 32 spoke Alexrims r500..
I replaced the broken spokes, have very little to no wobble and no rubbing on the brakes, but when I look down, it looks like something is off.. I put a spare wheel on and it was perfectly even on both sides unlike the stock wheel in the photo.. What could this be? (bent rim? internals?)
Is there anything obvious I should look for if I were to pull it apart? I released stress on the spokes, but it looked the same prior to doing so.
http://i774.photobucket.com/albums/yy26/flys564/2010-06-14-205430.jpg
It would probably ride smoother with some air in that rim. But other than that, I don't think the photo is clear enough for me to see anything wrong.
HOWEVER... There's this notion of "dish", which might be your ish. Basically, because you have gears on the rear wheel, the rim has to be centered between the dropouts, instead of between the hub flanges. That means that spokes on the cassette side have to be shorter and tighter than on the "non-drive side".
What I was trying to picture is that I can fit my thumb in the gap on the drive side, and only my pinky on the opposite side... but it's even between the brakes. It wasn't like the before, to the best of my knowledge, and I put another wheel on and it was even on both sides. I'm just wondering if riding on a wobbly wheel for 100 miles messed something up.. The spokes on the cassette side are tighter.
Don't worry, you didn't mess anything up. It sounds like the wheel is not dished properly. The fact that the brakes are centered suggests they are also out of whack but it's hard to say without seeing it. Being off-center is not a HUGE deal, but it will affect the handling.
Yeah, what they said. The dish is way off. Go around the wheel evenly tightening each nipple on the drive side and loosening each on the non-drive side, maybe a quarter or eighth of a turn depending on how far off it is. Repeat until centered, double check the roundness, and re-true.
That said, if you've broken three spokes in 850 miles, I might consider replacing all the spokes with some good quality ones. Or at least de-tension the whole wheel, and start the build over. It probably wasn't built very well in the first place.
Figured I would keep this thread going since it helped a lot. The dish was about half an inch off on one side. That's what I get for truing my wheel based on my brakes instead of a truing stand (my brakes were off). My spokes were "pinging" constantly while riding, not fun to listen to. I spent an hour or so at Kraynicks and everything is perfect now.
Now I that know about dishing, replacing spokes and truing, I would really love to build a set of wheels. I'm sure I would know everything I need to know by completing this. Thinking Mavic rims, DT Swiss spokes.. hubs? Any model #'s etc would be great.32 spokes vs ~24 spokes? Flat spokes "aerodynamic" but if one of those goes on a 24 spoke rim, is it harder to get true temporarily? What makes a rear hub so loud on some bikes and does it necessarily mean anything? I'm thinking a $300 budget if it means they will be a lot better than the stock rims I have.. Alexrims r500.
phil hubs!
sheldon brown recommends a minimum of 32 spokes in the rear, and says that 24 is a scam to make you think you're getting a better racier product when what you're really getting is a crappier wheel for more money. i don't know what the current consensus is, and since i don't race, the durability of the wheel is more important to me.
the sound that i assume you're referring to is the freewheel/freehub ratcheting. i've got a few decent shimano road hubs that are loud as all get out and a huffy that's dead silent and vice versa. i don't know how higher end hubs tend to sound, but i would guess you can get it both ways. it doesn't mean anything.
if $300 is your rim budget, you can surely get a better set than alex r500, but those ain't so bad, near as i know.
some wheels that are really loud are nice hubs that have freewheels/freehubs with more points of engagement on the freewheel so it clicks a lot more... for someone racing or doing really precise movements on a bike this can help make the bike tighter by removing the play that a normal freewheel offers... i think most freewheels are like 18 degrees of slack and the ones that are loud offer 6 or maybe even 3
The volume will be influenced by the weight of the oil in the freewheel. That's probably why the huffy is quiet.
