lacing wheels

[62typhoon]

Please do.I just bought a trueing stand but need to learn how to use it......LOL

do yourself a favor and mark each side of stand with 'TIGHTEN/ LOOSEN. I use to get screwed up because your standing behind the wheel not in front ..if that makes sence....also I have to be super focused no diversions or I start screwing up with which spoke to turn.

 

[Popshop]

yes, the measurement is correct 10 5/8 or 269mm. I do have a friend who can lace these up for me. He has done several here locally. I am trying to avoid buying excessively long spokes and allow him room to true the wheels. Thanks Ed

 

[Barfbucket]

Speaking of spoking wheels, I have two sets of Schwinn S2 wheels that need rebuilding. What size spokes do i need for the front. or the rear. The front hubs are Schwinn script hubs and the rear ones are new departure model D units.. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Check the cross, my schwinn wheels that I rebuilt had the same lengths spokes front and rear. Three cross on the front and four cross on the rear. The final cross was done incorrectly by modern standards, over three or four instead of over two and under one, etc. I don’t recall the length, this was years ago and the bike is long gone.

 

[Rivnut]

I’ve relaced a few original Schwinn wheels and found most of them do not have the “under” in the third or fourth cross.

 

[Scanner]

Did you use three cross or four cross

 

[Gimletbikes]

I’ve relaced a few original Schwinn wheels and found most of them do not have the “under” in the third or fourth cross.

I have noticed this too, on every schwinn I've checked. Why do you think that is?

 

[Rivnut]

Simplicity in building it in mass production.

 

[Gimletbikes]

Simplicity in building it in mass production.

Makes sense. So, these days, when a collector is rebuilding a wheel in a home workshop, would you speculate that it's more common preference to copy the schwinn method, or lace the spoke under in the 3rd or 4th cross? Just curious what you think

 

[Rivnut]

The last spoke under supposedly builds a stronger wheel but for no more than these bikes are ridden, there’s no reason not to make it easy on yourself and lace everything over.

 

[GTs58]

I always wondered what the difference would be in doing the over under method. I can't rationalize how it would make a stronger wheel by having two spokes with slight pressure against each other. How does that make a stronger wheel? I came across this analysis of radial to 4 cross lacing. I can understand how tying two spokes together would somewhat deter some of the deflection of those two spokes, but just having them rubbing each other couldn't possibly do anything other than directing the deflection.


Already, it should be apparent that the answer is that different spoking makes very little difference to the stiffness. All the plots have deflection scaled up 100 times, and you'd be struggling to see any difference.

Numerically, I can extract the vertical deflection at the middle of the contact patch:

model	deflection mm per 1000N	stiffness N per mm
0 cross	0.1628mm​	6143​
1 cross	0.1642mm​	6090​
2 cross	0.1654mm​	6046​
3 cross	0.1675mm​	5970​
4 cross	0.1703mm​	5872​

Conclusions​

So, a radially spoked wheel is about 4.6% stiffer than a tangentially spoked one. Alternatively, if you apply 1000N (about 100kg, 220lb) to each of the wheels, the tangential (four-cross) spoked one deflects 0.0075mm (0.0003 inch) more than the radial spoked. Since the tyre is likely to deflect several millimetres at least (if 3mm, that's 400 times more deflection) I conclude the spoking is unlikely to make a discernible difference to the vertical stiffness of the wheel.

Ian's Bicycle Wheel Analysis - Spoke Patterns