How to spoke a bicycle wheel

okay how-to spoke a magic pie Ramon - a magic pie motor so I've got the motor hanging on a stand here which is basically just the back end of a bike I cut off a few years ago basically you can do this right on your own bicycle just turn it right upside down and go from there now the idea of this is the holes as you can see on the side here there's two here and then to here okay and then on the opposite side there's two more okay and they're all in groups of four so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a spoke in this hole and

attach it to the wheel and then I'm going to go up here and put one in this hole and then attach it to the fourth hole down on the rim and then go to this hole here and go to the fourth hole on the rim and so on all the way around until I get that one hole filled all the way around on this side of the rim - every fourth hole on the rim itself another thing when I get started here is when I put the spoke through this hole I'm coming from the outside of the wheel in and then I'm gonna wrap it up to attach to

the wheel you can see there's an elbow there then it goes up to the wheel and then when I do the next one it will come from the outside and through into the middle and then up to the wheel okay so now I have the spoke going through the rim coming right out to the top and I just put a spoke nut on it and I give it a couple of turns maybe three times you don't want to do anything tight here because it'll make it much more difficult later you want to leave everything quite loose so I'm gonna do the next one now okay so as I mentioned

I'm gonna do every fourth hole so here's one in the first hole there and then I have one two three holes in between and then I'm in the fourth one so the same thing applies to the rim I have a spoke here I'm gonna have one two three holes in between and I'm into the fourth hole and I'm just gonna continue this all the way around the wheel okay and for clarity again I have a spoke in that hole coming out here and then I have one two three holes in between and then the next spoke which is in the fourth hole

so if I go down here I've got one two three holes and then the smoke is in the fourth hole so again up here I've got the spoke and then I've got one two three blank holes and the spoke is on the fourth one and this is basically as simple as can be the reason you're going in every fourth hole is there's three holes in between each spoke one two three and they're gonna go into the three holes in between here one two three okay so now I have one two three four spokes in and I'm moving up to the fifth spoke here and

now it no longer will stick out the rim at the top where I can just screw the thread or thread the spoke nut on easily and so what I do now is I just want to take another spoke and I put it on to the back of the spoke nut like this and then I stick the spoke through the hole which hole do I want here I want the fourth one so let's see I'm in this one you can see where that's the actual weld and the rim there for joining it together and down here you can see the spoke nut is now sticking out and I'll

be able to spin it on to the spoke unfortunately I only have two hands so I can't video that will I do it but that's the idea so now I've put the spoke nut on to the spoke and hold it in place with my hand and unscrew the extra spoke that I'm using to help okay so now I have nine spokes in it's a thirty spoke wheel and I have one in every fourth hole so that's nine spokes so now it's time to start the next batch so the next night I'm gonna do if you look at the where the whole alignment is here

there's one that's almost directly across from it so that's the one I'm going to do next and I'm gonna come in from the outside on there and come through and the idea of this is these spokes are actually supposed to cross so if I can get this correct here okay so they'll be a slight cross at the bottom and it's going to go into the hole it's right next to the one I just did so this spoke is there and this book is just gonna go into that next hole there so you have a slight cross okay you can see the spoke is in now and it's got a

very slight cross to it and while you can still see my helper spoke sticking out at the top to help get the spoke that on actually some people call the nipples so I call them spoke nuts you know it's just terminology but you get it so now I'm gonna go do the next one and that'll be four holes from the one I just put in or it'll also be the opposite side of this one and it's going to crisscross this spoke going in okay so now you can see I have 18 spokes in the wheel now so we got half the spokes

in and they're all in crisscross pattern all the way around and they're in the two holes that are right almost opposite each other on the wheel and now it's just a matter of the two spoke holes in between there's one on this side here and one on that side here they miraculously go to the two spoke holes up on the rim up here oh there's the one for the valve let's get away from that so it looks a little easier to understand but you've got spoke hole and a spoke hole and then up here you've got two holes between the spokes see there's

one there and one there so now all we're gonna do now is we're gonna put a spoke in from the outside here all right we're gonna run it through and then this one is gonna go into the hole that's next available up here right and then the spoke that comes through from the other side will go into the next hole here so these two these two spokes do not crisscross only the first 18 do the next 18 are just gonna fill them the two holes above all the way around okay so now you can see there's the crisscross

spokes here and here and then the two spokes in between just go straight up into the rim so the spokes are actually all in sets of four and I'll just play that in a minute but the crisscross is here and here and the two spokes in between just go straight up to the rim and of course you can see my helper spoke up there still okay and now my wonderful companion Jazmin has joined me out here what a great dog she is anyway you could see I've put a few more spokes in I usually put all these in in pairs you know like the gap in

between here I'll put these two in at once but anyway I just want to show you what I meant by they're there they're all in sets of four so you can see here you've got 4 spokes relatively close together to each other and they go to four holes together up above right and then the next group down well of course I've only got three in that one and three in this one so I'll show that example again in a moment okay so now I've got 18 spokes in the rim with the crisscross pattern and then I added the other 18 spokes in

between so now there's 36 folks in the rim and it took me about 15 minutes to do this it's really quite simple I remember when I used to get people at bike shops to do this for me I used to think they were genius I'm figuring out how to spoke her wheel it's so simple it's unbelievable so now you can see the wheel is still quite flexible he says I kept all the spokes nice and loose so I didn't have to fight with anything at all and I'm putting it together and now the next step is if you look right at

the spoke here you can see how many threads are sticking out now I don't expect you'll see that very well but there's about four threads sticking out there this one may be about six that one may be about six or maybe even eight and so on all the way around and so what I'm gonna do now that one's probably you pretend ten threads showing so what I'm gonna do now is I'm just going to tighten all the spoke nuts until there's only about two threads showing on each one all the way around the wheel and

that should tighten it up a bit it won't be so flexible and that's a good start on getting it Trude so that's the next step one thing I should mention people bring their bike wheels to a bike shop and the bike shop says that they don't have a spoke wrench that fits that spoke nut and that kind of blows me away because they're supposed to be a bike shop and supposed to have things that it can do this I go to a local department store in Canada here called Canadian Tire and I buy these for $3.75 it's

multi size it fits any regular bike ebikes whatever and you're going to use number 14 on here for our spokes and all you do when you put it on it's very simple you put it on and you slide it up so it goes over the net and then you turn the net okay so now I'm gonna put to tighten it up each one of them like I was saying until there's two threads showing on each nut oh and I should also mention that I'm sitting in a very squeaky chair so sorry about that okay so now you can see I've got about two threads on each one

showing and you want to try and be as accurate as possible when when you do this because you want to start off with the wheel really quite well centered and the reason that you want every one of them to be exactly the same before you get started is we're gonna try and get some accuracy going here and you want to make sure that if they're all at exactly two apart or I should say two threads deep when you turn the wheel you'll see know how like the wheel will not be moving in this direction back and forth

this way sorry about the lighting here but you can see that when I spin the wheel it's the same height all the way around there's no hop to the wheel it's exactly perfect and this is where a lot of people make a mistake is they don't get those two threads showing all the way around before they get started so now this wheel has zero hop to it and the next thing you want to look at is down here you want to make sure it's centered in the drop ODE or between the dropouts the droplets are back here but

anyway you want to look at the dropouts and you want to make sure that you have the axle nice snugly fit down inside the drop out on both sides and that you have the nuts tightened up reasonably tight so there's no chance of this wandering around on you at all because you're really going to want to try and get some accuracy going here and then up here when you look at it and you spin the wheel you can see that it's no relatively straight but it does have some watering to it which is okay because we're going to fix that but

right now it's spinning okay and there's no hop to it so I've got each thread above two threads sticking out from the spoke nut all the way around and I'm just going to go all the way around and check that again just to make sure that they're all really close to being exactly the same and another thing you want to do when you're working with the wheel is everybody always says that whenever you go around the wheel you should always find the place where the valve hole is and always start from there as a marker and if you were to

tighten each nut all the way around a quarter turn you would end up right here again and then all the nuts would be to tighten the same amount so you want to start from a certain location and stop from a certain location and I find if I don't put some sort of a mark here I always miss that so what I normally do is I take a piece of tape and I wrap it around here and I'm gonna put that on now and show it to you okay so all I did was I wrap some black electrical tape around it right where the valve hole is

you could actually put it anywhere you want on the rim it's just for your starting in stop point but this is sticking out far enough so that I'll see it when I'm going around and I won't go past it when I'm tightening these folks so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go around each spoke not all the way around and tighten them a quarter turn and also just for clarity a quarter turn is where the spoke wrench is flat like this and you turn it one quarter of a turn in and I'm gonna work my way all the way around

and the first one I started at was the one right above the tape here and I'm gonna end up with the one right below the tape when I stop and you can see I've taken quite a bit of looseness out of the wheel already tightening each one up with two threads left but the idea is to try and get your spokes tighter now not so much worried about the alignment side to side but to get the spokes nice and tight - not real tight but to the point that you're tightening it and you're not creating a hop in the wheel

as you go so one quarter turn all the way around and end up at the tape here again okay so now I've gone completely around the wheel and I've tightened each one up a quarter turn all the way around and if you're following me with this you will notice that some of them are a lot tighter already than others and the ones that are tighter you still want to do a quarter turn on and the ones that are looser you still want to do a quarter turn but maybe a little more and each time you go around the wheel and you're

taking a quarter turn the ones that are looser give them a little extra spin not a lot you know just enough to get them caught up to where at the point where the the spoke wrench itself isn't just spinning freely all the way around there is some resistance but you still want to try and keep the quarter turn all the way around as much as possible and the spokes had a really loose give them a little extra so I'm gonna go around to another quarter turn again okay so unfortunately started filming this right

at dusk but I blow it on the phone here announce that seems to be okay so what I've done is I've strung a zip tie around the around the the bike forks itself here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look at the distance between the wheel itself and the zip tie and see if it's close all the way around make sure there's no ha now you will notice the wheel is gonna wander from side to side here but there's no point well there's my tape of course there's no point where the wheel seems to be hopping it seems

to be the same exact distance from the zip tie all the way around maybe I can get a better view on the side here okay so this is about as unscientific as it gets but you know without a truing stand and everything this works pretty good you can see there's no hop to the wheel okay and I've got all the spokes reasonably tight I went around twice with a quarter turn and now I'm going to go around do a quarter turn again but this time it's all about spoke tension so what I'm gonna do is each time I

tighten one I'm gonna have a certain feeling as to how tight it is and if the next one feels a little looser I'm gonna turn it a little more and if the next one feels a little tighter than the next one I'm going to turn it a little less so I'm gonna go like some of them maybe an eighth of a turn some up maybe a quarter of a turn and some of them maybe even up to half a turn just to try and get that same tension all the way around and then I'm gonna go back to the zip tie there and check for a hop and make

sure I don't have any hop going on the idea is to do this a little bit at a time so you don't throw the wheel out okay so now I've gone around the wheel three times and each of the three times I turned at a quarter of a turn that was after I originally set all the spokes at about two threads sticking up maybe three threads but they were all pretty even and now I've gone around the wheel three times tightening it a quarter turn each time and the last time I went around well actually each time I went around I

was the ones that were very stiff I turned very little and the ones that were loose I turned a little more so on the third time around some of them I may have only turned maybe an eighth of an inch and some I didn't turn at all maybe eight of an inch an eighth of a turn some of them I probably only turned a sixteenth of a turn and others I may have turned up to three-quarters of a turn but the idea is to try and get all the spokes are relatively the same tension and if you start plucking them they make a sound right you want them

all to sound relatively the same it's not an exact science they'll never sound exactly the same but you can definitely go around plucking them with your finger and tell if any are real loose so the wheel is definitely starting to tighten up now I'm gonna go back over here and look at for a hump now I still don't see any hop everything looks really good all the way around I'm just having a little trouble holding my phone straight more than anything but you can see there's no hop in the wheel all the way around

everything looks good now when I look from the side or right at the very top I can see that the wheel is wandering from side to side a bit I'm gonna put something there now to be able to judge that maybe another zip tie or a piece of tape I'll see what I come up with okay so I've gone around the wheel another corner turned all the way around and what I was talking about with the spokes is you can just you can tell that they're all getting relatively tight your different tones but they're tight that one seems a little too tight my

turn pulled out when I was a little loosen that one off of it how many threads is that one in I'll see that one there's no threads on somehow I got that one too tight you can see threads on the on the ones beside it that one is a little too tight loosen that one that's right put a letter in here I'll find it again but they all have that tension you can hear it so that one that is a little too tight this one that one sounds loose so paint that one up a little bit now again this is very unscientific but a very simple way

of telling what spokes are too tight and which ones are too loose that one definitely needs to be tightened okay so by plucking the spokes I've gone around on it you know they don't all sound the same but you can tell there's a reasonable amount of tension on each one and now when I look at the end here I can see and of course this is unscientific again I'm gonna put my spoke key up against the rim here you can see the gap on that side and you can see the gap on this side is much smaller so the wheel is too far over this way

just looking here you can see it's too far over that way so the idea here is I want to pull the rim this way which is called dishing the wheel and on most bikes you dish the wheel towards where the free roll would go but on our bikes of course we have the the fan housing and the disc brake and everything in that so you know it does need to be dished the other way at least on this one anyway so I'm gonna get some sort of tool and measure the distance on each side and I got to pull it this way and the way to do that is when you look

at the spa all the ones that come to this side of the motor I'm going to loosen the Altima quarter turn and then I'm going to go to the other side of the motor and I'm going to tighten all those spokes a quarter turn and that will pull the rim over so I'm going to go around and do that and then come back and compare but for now we'll just look at this and you can see how much it's out okay so I went around and I loosened all the spokes on this side of the wheel here a quarter turn which is every second spoke all the

way around the rim and then I went on the other side of the motor and all the spokes come from that side I tightened a quarter turn so now let's look at the end here and you can see when I put the spoke wrench there look at how much I've moved the wheel over it's quite substantial so now when I put it on both sides it looks pretty close to the same so I can see a black part of the frame is almost half of the size of the whole and on this side almost half the size of the hole so right there I just shifted

the wheel over and now it's centered in the frame okay so now I'm going to very slowly turn the wheel and I'm gonna see if I feed it in the up and the wheel problem is I can't hold the phone still while I spin the wheel but it does appear that there is no hop the rim is completely the same all the way around if only I could hold the phone Strayer you would see that but there is no hop in the wheel with no up and I have it centered in the drop out here centered in the frame so now when I spin it we're

gonna look for wander so I'm gonna set something up on there we'll be able to gauge that okay so now I've just taped a piece of paper across the across the frame here and it's resting on that zip tie out underneath and I'm just gonna draw some lines on there where the wheel is but I'm just gonna spin it now you can see the wheel is wandering from side to side there is no hop but the wheel is wandering that black piece of tape I have on there is hitting so I'm actually gonna put that so it doesn't hit but I'm

gonna put some lines on the paper and we'll be able to tell if the wheel where the wheel is wandering so what I've done is I've marked two lines on there with a pen you know it doesn't have to be that accurate to where the wheel is but this is just gonna help me watch to see if the wheel is wandering and you can see okay here they're moving to the right of the lines of it already get rid of that piece of tape temporarily and then as I continue to spin the wheel we're back to the left so there is some wander in the wheel I'm

gonna get rid of that piece of tape and see and show you what to do next okay so hopefully I have the phone in a reasonable spot here I'm just gonna focus on this one side here because the other side is angled there you can see this parts pretty much straight up and down okay now I can see that this part of the wheel the line is inside the rim and as I spin it okay now the line is on the outside of the rim so this part of the rim you can see how much water is there so what I want to do is I want to find the spot

that's exactly in the center of where that is so right here it's outside the rim and I spent it and it's inside the rim to the point that it's outside again so that would be from here to here so now I'm backing up now the part of the rim that's off to that side is that whole side all the way around now you would think that you would just tighten and loosen a whole bunch of the spokes to move it over that way but that's not really well how it's done what you want to do is find a halfway point so the halfway point between where

the wheel is there and my finger is approximately here okay so this part of the wheel right here is too far that way so what I'll do is I want to pull it this way so what I'm going to do is two of the spokes that are on that side of the wheel which would be these two right here I'm gonna loosen those two a quarter turn and the spoke in the middle I'm going to tighten it a half a turn so I'm going to pull the wheel towards me so loosen these two a quarter and tighten that one a half okay so that's done what I did was I loosen

these two a quarter turn and I tighten this one a half a turn now we're gonna come back over here again let's see if I can get this lined up and when I bring that part of the wheel back to there you can see that part of the wheel is now in the spot you want so now there it's correct and there it's correct so I got to find the halfway point between that okay so that's there so now the halfway point between where my hand is and there is right around here okay so now I'm looking at it what I'm going to do is I'm going to loosen these

two because I'm working with the four spokes together here so I'm gonna loosen these two and tighten that one and that's gonna bring it this way okay so now as I said I loosened these to a quarter of a turn but you're on the other side of the wheel and I tighten this one a half a turn and I brought the wheel closer to me so now if we look at this part by the line here I'll keep my hand on it right there you can see it's now at the line okay so I'm going to spin the wheel look for another bad spot the stand is

watering all around here so it makes it kind of hard for you to tell what's going on but I can see it you just see seems to be quite good they don't let the stand fall wants okay let's try it some more here okay you can see there's some wander it's coming towards me no it's going away oh there's one part that's away right there get a little closer and look at that okay so okay you can see it's on this side of the line now it's on that side of line now it's on this side of line again so right there is where it starts to wander and it's off for quite a ways here and right there is where it's back so I'm gonna grab the spoke here where it's odd bring it all around and see it curves in now it's coming back out now that surprisingly is about half way around the wheel so don't mind the squeaky chair again halfway around the wheel so I got to grab a spoke up around here somewhere somewhere around here no I'll use the two on the other side so that would be these two and tighten this one that's in the middle of right here so I'm gonna loosen this one and this one a quarter turn and tighten that one a half and that will bring it towards me again just a moment things so you listen the two outside ones first okay so I loosened the two that are on the other side of the border here this one and this one and I tighten this one a half these two listed quarter let's see where that side with the Loney now looks pretty good it's amazing how just one slight adjustment could correct half the wheel okay now we're looking pretty close to being perfect so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go around I'm going to tighten all the spokes again another quarter turn if possible any that are real tight I'm not gonna tighten the full quarter turn and any that or loosen loose still I might turn a little more so so far I don't have any wheel hop and very slight wandering but I still have to tighten the spokes which will probably throw the wheel off again and then I'll correct it okay so now I went around the wheel and I tightened every spoke a quarter turn again the ones that are real tight I take it a little less than a quarter turn and the ones ever loose I tighten a little more than a quarter turn it does look like I've still don't have any hop in the wheel but I have introduced a little new wandering let's look at the line on this side at this time that's pretty good okay so I'm gonna go around the wheel again I'm gonna tighten them all a quarter turn again again the ones that are real tight I'm going to tighten a little less than a quarter turn and the ones that are looser I'm gonna taking a little more okay so now I've been around the wheel I don't know maybe a half a dozen times turning in a quarter turn at a time to tighten up all the spokes I've got them nice and tight you know if I pluck them they all have that nice sound to it they all sound tight or all basically about the same sound probably did this very leisurely within a boat you know including making this video within about two hours probably an hour of time on the wheel and maybe an hour of shooting the video and it came along quite easily and quite nice the wheel is you can tell here if I could just hold it still is perfectly true there are no hops there's no wander and turned out quite well it's actually very easy to do and it took really no tools at all hardly you know I have a little piece of black electrical tape a piece of paper a pen to draw a couple lines on it and the spoke tool which you buy at a local department store I paid this 375 for this a Canadian Tire locally here and there you go so that's how you build a wheel a magic pie wheel the same method works for any of our other motors the smart by the 902 motors the black magic they're all spoke the same way and you can use this video to build any one of them so have a great day it's gary Salo golden motor canada enjoy the ride thanks for watching you