Wide Gliders

Apparently it is time I vacuumed the floor again.....

Lacing wheels is one of my favorite pastimes. I know....weird, huh? But I find the process to be immensely satisfying and oddly calming. There is also something really cool about taking some stainless steel wires, some aluminum nuts, and an extruded piece of aluminum and assembling those components into a nice wheel set suitable for cycling.

I know several people that have told me that they have always wanted to learn how to lace up a wheel. Well.......get to it! It isn't as intimidating a process as you might think at first glance. But I get it. I was once on the other side and had similar thoughts until my first bike shop boss walked me through the process. Once I got the hang of it, I never stopped.

There are a lot of great resources available these days to get your feet wet and try out wheel building. I highly recommend giving it a go.

Now, back to these wheels. These are the ones I've been posting about lately, and now they are all laced up and ready to be tensioned and trued up. I don't expect them to be perfect, they are made up of all used parts, for the most part. I wouldn't recommend anyone use used parts, by the way. Always use new stuff, but in this case, I wanted what I wanted and you cannot get this stuff anymore. Plus, it was all paid for. All I had to do was recycle it into something usable.

You may recall that I said I had something special up my sleeve for this wheel set. Well, this hearkens back to my White Industries XMR wheel set I built up a few years back. There I decided to lace one side of a wheel in black spokes and silver nipples, and the other side with silver spokes and black nipples, then reverse on the rear wheel. This idea turned out pretty cool, and I haven't seen anyone else doing this. There probably is something out there like it, so I don't claim to be an innovator, but I liked it so much I decided that it is my "signature build".

Well, for this particular build I did the disc side of the rear silver and the disc side of the front in black, with the non-disc side front in silver and the drive side rear in black. Black spokes got silver nipples. Since the OS Bikes Blackbuck has a hint of red in its paint scheme, I used red nipples on the silver spokes. It's hard to see in the image here, but that turned out pretty well, I think.

Next up will be finishing up the build, taping the rims for tubeless, and installing rotors, a White Industries free wheel, and a set of tires. Then I'll get the Blackbuck down and get it set up with these wheels and it'll be all good to go. Stay tuned......