Advice - wheelbuilder wanted

[Jeremy Beswick]

Can anyone recommend a good (ie, competent and really experienced) wheelbuilder? Someone who can give good advice about which hub, rims and spokes will best suit my purposes? I have just ordered a Condor Leggero (carbon) frameset, and will build the bike myself during early 2012. I plan to buy a Chorus groupset, rather than Record, because I believe the extra expense of Record could be better used on appropriately good wheels; and my experience leads me to think that handbuilt rather than factory wheels is the way to go. If possible, I would prefer to support a local (ie, London-ish)business.

I will be grateful for any ideas and recommendations!

[Deleted]

Got to be Harry Rowland:

www.harryrowland.info/

[Deleted]

Build them yourself. It is very relaxing and satisfying. Riding on wheels that you have built yourself is a great feeling.

Instructions are available from Sheldon Brown's website that are easy to follow.
sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html

As for components, we would really need to know what you want to use the wheels for, but assuming fast road riding and some road/criterium racing (not time trialling):
If the rest of the groupset is Chorus, then that's the hub decision made - Chorus hubs are easily good enough for anybody who is unlikely to win the BBC SPOTY.
Rims - Mavic Open Pro are a great rim for road riding and racing, and are easy to build into a strong, light wheel (and they are not too expensive).
Spokes - Stainless steel double butted every time, either DT Competition 14/15 gauge, or ACI, or Sapim.
Nipples - brass. Aluminium alloy ones are about 10g per wheel lighter (ie negligible - you'll pick up more weight the first time you ride through a puddle), but they corrode horribly and make the wheel much more difficult to true, and the threads are just SO easy to strip.

The tools are cheap (wheel jig, dishing tool, and spoke key) can be got for about £130 all in (about what you'd pay in labour for a pair of wheels to be built). For example, Chainreaction have a Park Tools wheel jig for £115.

[Deleted]

I'm with Graham. It's a bit tricky getting your head round it to start, but once you've got the hang of it it is satisfying. I bought a second hand jig (from Pierre on this very forum) for 40 quid and I made my own dishing tool out of three pieces of ply and an old bolt.

Trickiest thing is getting spoke lengths right, but there is plenty of advice out there. I recommend dt swiss prolock brass nipples. They have a bit of thread lock in them which keeps everything in place.

All that said I don't actually greatly enjoy the building process. The satisfaction comes afterwards.

I really really recommend tubeless wheelsets. Been running tubeless road, cross and mtb wheels for a few years and there's no way I would go back to either clinchers or tubs. Stans No Tubes makes a very light rim that is designed to be run tubeless called the Alpha 340. There's a shop near Sheffield called Just Riding Along which has an excellent reputation for wheelbuilding. I am contemplating a pair of the Alpha 340s on Royce hubs. Just need to sell some more furniture first...

[mark earl]

Build them yourself!

I can recommend 'The bicycle wheel' by Jobst Brandt - an excellent book (I'm not sure if it is still in print though)

I started by taking apart an old front wheel and then set about rebuilding and generally messing around with it before I trusted myself with new components.

A spoke tension gauge is also quite handy unless you have fantastic hearing and can ping the spokes and differentiate different tones

[Deleted]

Harry Rowland will give you great advice on hubs and rims based on your weight, frame, riding needs, and so on. Good bloke and lovely finish to his wheels.

[Deleted]

Derek at wheelsmith also seems to be well regarded by all but it's got to be him or Harry Roland for the most well known in the UK.

www.wheelsmith.co.uk/

Alternatively you could ask Condor, they just built me a great set (Ambrosio Excellights, DT Revs and Chris King R45's).

I'd also recommend doing it yourself, I've been finding it strangely therapeutic.

[Jeremy Beswick]

Thank you all very much for your very helpful responses. I will build my own wheels (for the first time) on my old bike this summer - and I know that I will enjoy it, because I'm a bit like that - but for this new bike I want a pro job done. Condor built my wheels for my existing bike, and that's been a success so I have Condor in mind again, but I am also very glad to have Harry Rowland so well recommended.
I've looked at Strada's website, which impresses. Anyone got a view on their wheel-building proposition?

[Pete Owen]

Grahame is pretty much right - very sensible solid advice.

I run Rat Race Cycles - www.ratracecycles.com - and I've built literally hundreds of wheels, probably even into four figures. I taught myself, back in 1998, from Sheldon Brown's excellent page at www.sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html, although I'd also recommend Roger Musson's wheel building book and of course Jobst Brandt's "The bicycle wheel" (and I've done all the levels of Cytech since then too).

You _can_ do it yourself, it's an excellent skill to learn and you also learn how to solve problems yourself if your wheels go out of true in future. However, I'd be very happy to have a chat with you about what you need, what you want, and of course to give you a quote for parts and for me to build them. I live in Catford (the workshop is based in Charlton) so I'm pretty local!

A wheel build would normally cost £80, although we have a DP member discount so would be £72 for you, but if you bought all the parts from us I'd build these wheels for £40. Based on grahame's sound suggestions I'd recommend Chorus hubs, Sapim Race (stainless steel double butted 2.0/1.8mm) spokes, Sapim brass polyax nipples and Mavic Open Pro rims, although I prefer the CD anodised finish for extra durability - if you're going to get wheels hand-built, you may as well spend a couple of extra quid per wheel to ensure the braking surface lasts an extra year!

...having just checked, it appears that Campag aren't making Chorus hubs at the moment, in fact they don't have any hubs on their website below Record level.

So I could offer:
Record front hub = £85
Record rear hub = £135
Mavic Open Pro CD 2x£45 = £90
Sapim Race x64 = £25
Wheel builds = £40
...totalling £375.

Let me know what you think, and if you're interested. I'm not on here as often as I'd like (much like my riding with DP!) but you're welcome to email me at [e-mail].

I ought to add that I've built wheels for everything from downhill racers to long-distance tandem tourers, unicycles, BMXs, weight-weenie scary-light builds and lots and lots of commuters. All my wheels have a lifetime warranty, in other words I'll re-true them free of charge as long as you haven't done something silly to them. I've had very very few wheels come back to me.

Hope this helps!

Pete

[Deleted]

A friend of mine ordered his carbon wheels from this guy: www.rar-wheels.com/en

Very friendly guy, who originally started building wheels for pleasure and made a business out of it!
He now has his own range of wheels.

I tried the Even in 38mm, quite impressive how much of a difference it make compared to Fulcrum Racing Zero!!

[Deleted]

Try George Gori at Sigma. A new mechanic of a few months...but he is superb!! [phone]

[Jeremy Beswick]

@pete; thanks very much for this. I will email you now and look forward to discussing this with you offline.
Jeremy

[Deleted]

@pete - hope you don't mind me jumping on this thread, but I've been thinking about something similar in terms of a new set of hand-built wheels (albeit with more modest hubs - thinking Shimano 105, or something similar). Like Jeremy, I'll drop you an email over the weekend with a bit more info.

Apologies for the hijack Jeremy!

[Deleted]

For those who don't have £1000 for a pair of boutique wheels, I can recommend Miche racing box hubs for a cheap but v. solid build. I had my current commute/training wheels built up by one the chaps at BC Bikes in East Dulwich.
Hubs: £64 quid (Shiny bikes)
Rims: £25 quid for a pair of Rigida DP18 rims off ebay (new) 32 hole
£120 for build with Sapim Race DB spokes
about £210.00 in total.
As training wheels they are great - nice and solid with a decent road buzz damping mass about them. Build quality?: After 3000 miles under my unfeasible bulk they are perfectly true.
I wouldn't bother with Open Pros - too light and not stiff enough to stay straight.

[Deleted]

I have to disagree with you on the Open Pros, tallyho. Anybody who knows me will agree that I'm at the "more gentlemanly" end of the build spectrum, and the pair I built for myself about 4 years ago have logged several thousand miles of club rides and commuting with barely a tweak from the spoke key.

The key is get them built properly with the right amount of tension in the spokes. Many home-builders (and some shop-based wheelbuilders) make the mistake of not properly tensioning the spokes. This gives two problems - "floppy" wheels and spokes that break from fatigue as they are cycled between tension and compression twice every wheel rotation. Of course, too much tension is not desirable either, as spokes and nipples can pull through the holes in the rim.