I never know what rims will walk through my door, the freshness of the tooling on the day they were made, the chain of custody from the factory, etc. So I have a prebuild ritual that involves quite a lot of inspection. I don’t want to call it a checklist — I’m just creating opportunities to notice what’s in hand. If attention is given to each facet, anything awry stands out.

On alloy rims I like to visit every spoke hole with a chamfer tool or a handheld drill bit. This puts a subtle profile in the hole where the head of the nipple rests. Sometimes there can be a coil of drilling chaff attached to a spoke hole — a chamfering pass breaks them off and smooths any burrs. When I visit the joint I look at the internal sleeve, if any. Does it interfere with nipple fit? And so on.

Measuring is inspecting

Measuring your own ERD can indicate a lot. Use the measuring step to test fit washers if using them. Do the washers sit nicely in the rim? Measuring will tell you if your rim round or oval. All else being equal the rounder the rim, the better the expected result in terms of alignment and tension balance. If your rim is oval, take a deep breath and expect to spend a little longer at the bench if chasing numbers is your thing. Have you ever found a job difficult and doubted your skills? It could be the rim but more comforting to know than to guess.

SpokeService is now closed for 2019. I’ll be taking the remainder of the year to clean the workshop, overhaul tools, count inventory and close the books. The online shop will remain open but orders won’t ship until operations resume in January. The site will have a little downtime for server upgrades, which means my free software utilities may be unavailable for short periods.

Looking forward

Growth in 2019 was positive but below expectations. The upside of available hours was time to work on my digital truing stand, now reaching maturity. I’ve manufactured a few units that I hope to share with beta testers in early 2020. More information coming to this blog in the near future.

Happy holidays and tailwinds in 2020.

Ric from Wheel Fanatyk visited recently and wrote about it on his blog. He was interested in my Morizumi setup and maybe others will be too. I’ll leave a few notes and build photos here. Read more →