And if in doubt, take your wheel to a specialist for trueing, you’ll have saved a fair bit of cash by doing the lacing up yourself!įor a first attempt at wheel building I’m delighted with the results. All the spokes should sound similar (or, in fact, ‘ring true’!). ‘Ping’ each tightened spoke with a screwdriver and listen to the note it sounds. Don’t fully tighten any spokes until the rim is running true, then go round and ensure the spokes are all tightened to a similar tension. However time and patience should allow you to get within a couple of millimetres of perfectly true, which is good enough for our purposes. Most wheel rims are made from an extrusion or pressing which is formed into a circle and welded up, so there will inevitably be a little fluctuation which is impossible to true out. Playing around with spoke tensions at the trueing stage can also allow you to fine tune any runout and make sure the rim spins concentrically, both radially (up and down) and laterally (side to side). A skilled wheel builder can vary the amount of offset by judicious adjustments to the spokes, so the idea is take the guesswork out of it and duplicate the factory settings.
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When your new rim is laced up it needs to match these figures for offset, and if you’re not doing the job yourself make sure you pass the measurements on to your wheel builder. Note down the figure, then turn the wheel over and measure the other side too. Before dismantling the wheel, set the whole thing on a flat surface and measure the distance from worktop to rim edge.
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Particularly on a rear wheel, the rim may be offset to one side to allow clearance between chain and tyre. Rule one for working on older motorcycle wheels – don’t assume the rim runs in line to the centre of the hub. My project XT500 provided an excellent opportunity as I’d just had the hub powder coated by Triple S and now needed to replace the rim I’d spent hours polishing. But having had a go at almost every other aspect of bike spannering over the years, I was aware that actually re-spoking a wheel was scary new territory, and it was about time I had a go. I have always farmed out wheel re-spoking to a specialist, and since discovering the talents of Paul Jackson (01422 378100) many years ago, have always been more than happy to keep turning up at his workshop, drop my hubs and rims in a pile on the floor (with a note of offsets, of course), and call back a couple of weeks later to collect the shiny results.