Re-lacing front/rear spoked wheels?

[Hammered]

Lacing a wheel is easy. Ok maybe easy is too blanket of a term. Its not difficult by any means. The hardest part is not letting your eye confuse you with the pattern. And trueing a wheel isnt all that hard either, if you have a spare swingarm or set of forks youre not using.

The first thing to do is repeat the pattern your wheel originally had (easiest to follow and order spokes for) once all the spokes are in place, finger tighten all the nipples so that the spoke just does start to flush with the top of the nipple. Once you have all the spokes even, then and only then are you ready to start trueing the wheel.

Things you will need: Patience, small open end wrench, new spokes and nipples, time, spare swing arm or other means for trueing oh and did I mention patience?

Things you dont need:special spoke wrench, tons of money for mechanic, space, experience.

Once you get the spokes and wheel close, place the wheel on an axle or a decent substitute. Anything that fits in the bearing hole and allows to wheel to roll freely. Place the wheel on the swingarm or other stand and mark the first nipple as a starting point. Start tightening each nipple 1/2 to 1 full turn all the way around one full rotation of the wheel. Check to see if the heel free rolls to the "heavy" side of the wheel. If it does, and it will a few times, adjust (tighten) nipple opposite of the bottom side by 1/4 to 1/2 turns of the nipple until balanced. It takes time and patience. If you find youre all muttered up, simply stop, loosen the spokes back the starting position of flush with the nipple's top and start over. This is one of the few skills that is 100% about feel. There is no real shortcut by saying torque it to this or that. Trueing is more and art. It helps to take a couple clear pictures of how the pattern was so you can look at it while youre relacing the new spokes. And by recreating the OE pattern, you wont need to guess at the spoke length. Hope that helps and that you decide to give it try.

[Ranger]

I'll build a downhill mountain bike wheel this week before my lady gets into town and make a video as well as pictures time permitting. Then I'll send them to you, sound good?

Worst case go to a bike shop, most around the country charge about $45 an hour labor for building a wheel and are capable of building a motorcycle wheel. Either way you'll be under $100 given that a truing stand isn't cheap. Park Tools makes the best ones, if you wanna send the stuff to me I can even build it for around $30 bucks each depending how many spokes you plan on running and when you need it back by.

[Gumbo76]

Lacing Wheels

Check out this Video Podcast on iTunes. It's free. These are a few guys who get together and wrench on bikes. I think you'll find the videos pretty neat. There is one regarding lacing up wheels. At least truing them. They show a couple of good techniques.
Enjoy!

http://www.garagenight.tv/ep-9-new-spokes-on-an-old-wheel/

-Gumbo

[SDBuckeye]

Hi,
These guys are running a special this month:

http://www.tasmotorsports.com/

Cheers,
Lyle

[Road_Clam]

I've never laced street wheels, but have done severall dirt wheels. It's relatively easy once youy know a few tricks ! You don't need a truing stand, all's you need to do is insert the wheels axle, and clamp the axle in a vice horizontal. You will need a magnetic dial indicator to pull the wheel to within a tighter "street" spec. I typically use a pencil to get the wheel runout close, then swap to a dial indicator. Google "how to lace a motorcycle wheel" and you will archive a year's worth of reading. Make sure you measure the offset of your OLD wheel first, and write those dimensions down, so you can tweak the newly spoked wheel and get the dimension close. Last tip, if you are batting rusted siezed nipples, just use a cutoff wheel and just cut them. You can spend weeks trying to unsieze corrodded nipples sometimes it just ain't worth it !

Here's a helpfull Youtube vid so you can see how it's done :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CUuugCn4eY