Time to build wheels?

I went for a night ride last night with some of the wheelers and met a guy who built his own wheels, took ~five hours he said and he also worked at a bike shop so I am sure he had experience with truing and was very familiar with the ins and outs of the whole thing. This morning I open up the email and from Peter White’s “Bicycle Lifestyle” google group I find the post I am listing here:

Piaw’s Blog: The Bicycle Wheel

There are a couple of videos, and information from googlers teaching googlers on how to build your own wheels- so do I take the plunge is the question. My only hold up is the investment, this is truly a worthy skill to have but the local bike shop (LBS) and inner nets can sure take care of me. The first video makes a good point about problems on the road and having the skill to deal with it, but I usually don’t go very far and to be beyond cell phone operation is even more rare.

Then there is Peter White who personally guarantees his work, and build price is very reasonable at $35 a wheel with 24-36 spokes. I will mentally bounce this around for a while, do some calculations and think about it some more.

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Tags: bike