It's amazing what you can do with a bundle of thin steel wires, lightweight aluminium rims and hubs. With a few turns of the spoke nipples, the flabby wire structure of a freshly stored wheel becomes an extremely resilient and durable wheel for many thousands of kilometres on a road bike. The trick is the pre-tensioning - it enables the division of labour in the wheel: the pressure on the wheel becomes tensile forces that are distributed over many spokes, making the filigree mesh very strong. Sufficiently high and even pre-tensioning of the spokes is the secret of wheel construction.
In the past, it was quite common for road cyclists to spin their own wheels or have this done by their trusted dealer. Today, system wheels dominate the market. This refers to wheels with precisely matched components such as special hubs and rims, which are not sold individually or only at astronomically high spare part prices. The prices for good wheels have risen sharply as a result of this tactic by the manufacturers - and spare parts are much harder to come by.
But if you look, you can still find a variety of interesting rims and hubs that can be used to build good wheels - customised to suit your own aesthetic and technical preferences and needs. Red, blue or gold nipples, spokes in silver, black or white? The choice is yours. Solid black or light and airy silver rims? The choice is yours. You can build the wheels exactly the way you want them.
Do it or let it be done?
The path to a customised wheel leads either through professional wheel builders or your own workbench. For anyone who enjoys building their own wheels, this is a fulfilling task that is not particularly difficult to learn - you just need a little patience.
You just need a little patience. Firstly, you should build a training wheel with a relatively large number of spokes. This is much easier to centre than a rim with few spokes or an exotic spoking pattern.
The first question is: What should the bike be able to do and which components should be considered? Technical aspects are the load capacity (depending on the rider's weight), the riding resistance and the braking behaviour. The rim plays the central role here: the wider it is, the more laterally rigid it is. Its height determines how stiff it is and therefore how much load it can bear. If the rim is stable, you can plan for fewer spokes. In the past, 36 spokes were normal, but today most system wheels roll on 24 or fewer spokes. The shape of the rim also has the greatest influence on the aerodynamic drag of the wheel. Flat and angular profiles are bad, voluminous profiles with a teardrop-shaped cross-section are good. As our wind tunnel tests have shown, 30 millimetre high, well-rounded profiles achieve quite acceptable wheel aerodynamics.
Elastic lasts longer
You should also choose the spokes according to aerodynamic aspects - unless you want a training or touring wheel where the riding resistance is irrelevant. Round spokes, like all cylindrical shapes, are aerodynamically weak. Better - but unfortunately also around five times more expensive - are flat forged blade spokes. Spokes with alternating diameters - so-called double-thick-end spokes (DD) - are also recommended for many purposes. By leaving the highly stressed bend and the thread thick and reducing the cross-section in the centre, the spoke becomes more elastic and stretches more. The higher elasticity has a positive effect on the service life because it prevents the spoke from ever becoming stress-free during operation. Spokes that are regularly relieved of tension break quickly. If, on the other hand, the spoke always works under pre-tension, it hardly fatigues. Some wheel manufacturers therefore even give a lifetime guarantee on their hand-built wheels. DD spokes are also forged into aero spokes. These thin aero spokes are around 35 per cent lighter than solid bladed spokes and also have the advantage that they fit through the normal spoke holes in the hub. The spoke manufacturer Sapim classifies its Cx-Ray aero spoke as by far the most durable spoke in its range.
Solid, non-butted spokes, on the other hand, increase the stiffness of the wheel. This can be desirable for aero wheels with very few spokes or for particularly heavily loaded wheels of heavy riders. The prerequisite is rims with sufficient radial stiffness so that the stiffer spokes always remain under preload.
Hubs at a competitive price
Good hubs don't have to be expensive. Taiwanese products such as Bitex, Halo and Novatec are available cheaply from small importers. They are built with standard deep groove ball bearings, some of them are also very light, and they are easy to maintain. They are not inferior to hubs in system wheels and are sometimes even used in them. Classics from European production are DT Swiss (Switzerland; stable spur gearing of the rotor), Hope (England; robust, stainless steel bearings) and Tune (Germany; light, great finish). However, hubs contribute little to the noticeable riding impression. This is mainly determined by the rim and spokes. The most important requirement for hubs is therefore their reliability.
Using three pairs of impellers as examples, we show in the PDF download below what is currently possible and where the limits of customisation lie.
Downloads:
download
