Two Wheel Blogs

Recent discoveries have lead me to seek the advice of an even bigger bike geek than me.
I have been experiencing some problems lately with tires, and the cause of my problems is pretty easy to get my head around. It is a simple combination of bad luck and tires not well suited to my riding style. No sense in fighting it...I am going back to the tires that work well for me. I am not chasing the dream of faster, lighter, and less rolling resistance any more (this season at least). The DH/Freeride inspired Nevegal is almost certainly the tire that will carry me out of 2007.

I have been having problems with my wheels also. It seems that they will not stay straight, and the spokes can not be evenly tensioned. I know a thing or two about wheel building but probably not a third thing. Seriously though, I have built 2 sets of wheels, and consider myself proficient at truing wheels. I own a spoke tension meter, but anyone with 60-100 bucks could make that claim.

Anyway, I used my tension meter to gage the spoke tension of my wheels and knew nearly immediately that this problem was beyond my ability to fix. Neighbor spokes varied in spoke tension by over 50% in some cases. Faced with the choice to either even out the tension a bit and further distort the already wobbly wheel, or to tru the wheel and create an even larger imbalance in spoke tension, I sucked up my pride and headed to my local wheel builder.

Once there, I was introduced to my wheels. With a jeweler's pick in hand, and a magnifying glass, he began pointing out problems.

I typically do my own wrenching on my bikes, but I have seen the work this guy turns out (he builds frames too BTW). I wish I had photos to share.

I feel compelled to mention a set of wheels I saw him build. These wheels were built, tuned, then the spokes were brought to very high tension before being tied and soldered. Not my cup of tea for what I do, but the build was consistent for the period that the bike represented (the vintage bike also had a well worn Brooks saddle, tubular tires, and very limited number of gear ratios compared to todays road bikes). I can only guess how long it must have taken to build these wheels (the wire wrapping at the spoke crossings looked like a tiny spool of thread with no wraps crossing one another, then the wrap had a the thinnest veneer of solder sweated in place). Since seeing this bike, I have secretly longed for a vintage track bike worthy of wearing a similar set of wheels. The one in the photo below would work nicely (it is the first Paramount ever made by Schwinn).

So back to my story...MY wheels. I was hoping that this guy was a magical wheel builder that could tension my spaghetti spokes, and leave me with strong and straight wheels (this is really important to me since my tire/frame clearance is tight). The answer I got was that he is good, but my wheels will require more than a spoke wrench and a whole lot of experience...Should have all the necessary parts next week.