gugie 

Nice thing is the shelving came with the spokes! It's nothing special, looks like something from Ikea, but with a bit of real wood reinforcing the fiberboard it works and I had the perfect spot for hit in the Atelier.

Bad Lag

Well, that is a great offer. Thanks for that.

The sting has already faded a bit.

All I want now is to get the replacement spoke installed so I can go riding again.

gugie 

$18, not even a Jackson.

Collectively we can help keep our vintage machines on the road.

Bad Lag

The spokes showed up in the mail today. I wasn't expecting that.

I am feeling a little more, maybe a lot more, charitable given their speedy service for the money paid. That, and the fact that they had them at all.

Bad Lag

The more I think about it, the more pleased I was with the speedy service this shop offered on the replacement spoke.

Actually, given the age of the existing wheels and the likelihood they will soon need to be replaced, I will have to go back and see what wheels or wheel building services they offer.

It was small order but they had what I wanted and handled my small order very well.

Bad Lag

Ha!

I am a fool.

You guys most assuredly know this by now.

I constantly re-prove it. Here's today's episode.

Prepping to repair the rear wheel, I easily found my dishing gage and spoke wrench but had to scrounge in my tool box for the spoke tension gage. While doing so, I came across,... you guessed it,... a whole BOX of spokes that would have fit the wheel. They are double butted stainless steel, too. LOL!

It's okay to laugh. After all, I am the fool.

Questions -

1. How accurately do you true your wheels? Is a 0.010" band (+/-0.005") too loose, too tight, just right? Is that overkill on truing?

2. What are the recommended spoke tensions for the dished and non-dished sides? How about tension up front (not dished)?

3. The old spokes are marked "P". Who made those, does P = Performance Bike Shop, where I bought the wheels?

ThermionicScott 

If you're a fool, so am I. I find the best way to coax a lost part out of hiding is to buy its replacement.

I haven't worked with the MA2 specifically, but I've heard that 100-110 kgf on the drive side works really well. The non-drive side will need to be lower to center the wheel, but strive to keep the tensions even on each side.

Never tried to put a number to how true my wheels are. I just keep going until there's a continuous stream of clicky-ping-scrape sounds on each side of the rim, that all go silent at the same time when I retract the calipers of the truing stand a tiny bit.

Good luck!

mpetry912 

Great thread and glad to see Yojimbo's Garage mentioned. Marcus is great and does sell on ebay.

don't get too carried away with the tensiometer in this case. You want to merge the tension of the new spoke in with the others. Winding a 35 year old wheel up to "100-110 kgf" will probably result in more broken spokes.

I would suggest you "ping" the spokes so you have a sense of how tight they are, and then as you true, try to focus on bringing your new spoke up to tension without doing too much twisting of the others.

Get the wheel within a mm or so if you can,. then go ride it for a while and re-true. be sure to replace the nip as well.

Mark Petry
Bainbridge Island, WA USA

ThermionicScott 

That's an excellent point. When working with an older wheel, I try to "respect" the tensions that were used to build it unless I have a darned good reason not to.

gugie 

Dialing in true and round to perfection rarely results in the strongest wheel. You have to balance tension, true and round, but I'd err on a less round wheel if it keeps the tension relatively even. If you're true within a mm, that's good enough.

mpetry912 

"respect the tension" of spokes in an older wheel. That is exactly right.

Mark Petry
Bainbridge Island, WA USA

Salamandrine 

1. I think that is overkill, but if you can get that without too much fussing it's fine. As a couple people have already noted, it is counterproductive to try to get a rim too perfect. The best wheels are built relatively quickly and not fussed over too much. It took me some time to learn this lesson, as I tend toward perfectionism.

With vintage rims, you'll find that when you start getting them super true, what happens is one side is true, but the other isn't - due to manufacturing irregularities. Obviously there's little point in trying to exceed those. AFA real numbers, I think about +/-0.015" is sufficient, *maybe* +/- 0.010".

2. I think you could go a bit higher to 110-120 on the drive side. An MA2 can take it. NDS wherever it needs to be to dish properly. I was wondering about what vintage spoke tensions actually were recently. Someone brought up spoke tension on a recent thread about NR high flange hubs, and it seemed high to me. Turns out they were right. No one used tension meters BITD, realistically. Anyhow, out of curiosity I measured the tension of one old wheel I still have, probably built in 1982 or so. NR high flange and GP4. Drive side tensions were about 124-125 on average. This would have been very mainstream at the time. Kind of interesting to me. By about 10 years later, many people were building to much higher tensions than this, which is a bad idea, but I won't anymore.

BTW the above advice is really for a new build. An old rim is likely to not want to be nearly that true. Best thing is to compromise between even spoke tension and true enough. For a simple spoke replacement, there's no need to retension the wheel. Just put in new spoke and tighten up until the rim is as true as it was before. Then do a little touch up truing, and stop.

Bad Lag

I got the rim in a band of 0.010" total runout without too much trouble. That's a testament to the quality of the build on these wheels, especially considering they are 35 years old. I hope I did not mess with their prior success.

What surprised me a little was the dishing was off. Not a lot,.. but off by 0.05". That was easy to fix, too.

All the nipples turned with almost no trouble.