Monday, January 11, 2016

Wheel building tools

Built this bicycle wheel truing stand for $20 in materials, based on a plan and wheel-building method by Roger Musson in his excellent book. The stand is not quite finished: it needs two plastic reference guides added to the lateral and radial truing tools, but I didn't have any suitable material on hand.


Update: it's finished!


The blue dishing tool in the background is a Park WAG-4 which I found online for about $65.

Next up is to make a nipple shuffler like this one from Wheel Fanatyk:


It's a simple but ingenious tool with at about a 100-year history in wheel-building factories. 

Now I'm Jonesing for this gorgeous Morizumi spoke threading machine which eliminates the need to stock a wide range of lengths for each spoke type/colour while enabling perfect spoke lengths.


Although all these tools are aimed at bicycle wheel-building, the theory and many of the techniques apply equally to motorcycle wheels. So I have a plan to add tooling and build motorcycle wheels for MX and ADV riding. 

More to come on all this in a future post!