I said I was going to provide 20 wheel building tips in 2009. Well, a slew of distractions conspired to keep the number to merely 6. My apologies!
For 2010 the series will continue, and I vow to complete the remaining 14. Thanks for your interest and I hope you’ll feel your patience is rewarded.
Nothing quite greets the new year like a brilliant new bike and Sam Whittingham has just finished a doozy. This is for someone at River City Bicycles in Portland.
© Sam Whittingham
Don’t know about your spot on this globe but up here (Latitude: 47.606) it’s pretty dark at 4:30 and the ski resorts are all open. Time for some seasonal service for those wood wheels I ride all year.
Wood rim wheels are low maintenance, but it pays to give everything a good look over at least once a year. Here are your tasks:
(1) Dismount your tires
Once a year, remove your tires (unless they’re tubulars and the tires fresh) and inspect the wheels, inside and out. Look for anything abnormal. If a wood rim is going to delaminate, it’s probably because the wood glue is failing. Before the era of epoxy, glues aged and eventually turning to dust. Such a condition can, on close inspection, be detected long before the rim actually splits. Nipples and the compression loads that spokes create in the rim both act to hold a delaminating rim together. But it’s a bad idea to continue riding such a rim, which is still fine for display. Read more →
