Re: [CR]Phrasing about wheel building

(Example: Racing:Jacques Boyer)

Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 13:08:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Fred Rafael Rednor" <fred_rednor@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [CR]Phrasing about wheel building
To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
In-Reply-To: <4308D0DA.1070707@erols.com>


When my wife and I visited the LeJeune factory in 1983, a large part of the facility was devoted to the wheel building machines. These were quite impressive and my recollection is that they also laced the hubs. (That's my recollection and it was 22 years ago. Please correct me if, in fact, the machines were "loaded" with pre-laced hubs.)

Anyway, they told me that the wheels for quality bikes were finished by hand. Lesser bikes got wheels straight from the machine. In should be noted that they did have humans inspecting the wheels as they came off of the machines, at least for the adult bicycle wheels.
     Cheers,
     Fred Rednor - Arlington, Virginia (USA)


--- HM & SS Sachs wrote:


> Tom's question has to be broken down into pieces of
> wheel-building. Jim Papadopoulos (underacknowledged co-author
> of Wilson's "Bicycling Science" and I watched machines
> simultaneously tighten and tension 36 spokes of steel-rim
> bikes at the Schwinn factory in Chicago, in 1974, and these
> machines did not seem new.
>
> I suspect that these machines were "fed" with hubs that had
> been already laced to rims, since machine vision and such
> were not there yet. But, I suspect that these preliminary
> steps are still manual in the big Chinese factories, where
> labor is less expensive than capital.
>
> I don't regularly track the patent literature, but
> Papadopoulos tells me it is very interesting (and probably
> more fun than tracking eBay). Not coincidently, he has a
> patent on a machine that is a real advance: using feedback to
> PROPERLY tension the spokes in a single pass.
>
> Incidently, the most impressive lesson I learned at the
> Schwinn plant was not what I expected, and not what they
> emphasized: for production bikes, the hard part of bicycle
> design isn't choosing angles or picking components. The hard
> part is designing and constructing a productive manufacturing
> system.
>
> harvey sachs
> mcLean va
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> Tom Hayes asked,
>
> << In reading auction descriptions on Ebay and elsewhere
> phrasing such as
> "hand
>
> built" or "custom-built" wheels is used repeatedly.>>
>
>
> >>>>Are there such things as machine built wheels? On the
> one hand, I cannot
> >>
> >>
>
> imagine companies such as those that sell complete bikes to
> K-Mart or
>
> Wal-Mart hand building wheels. The cost to pay someone to
> lace the wheels
>
> alone would preclude selling the bike for eighty dollars or
> whatever they
>
> charge. On the other hand, however, I try to imagine the
> machine that would
>
> lace, tighten, and true a wheel, and it escapes my
> imagination.>>
>
>
> <<If such machines exist, are they capable of building a
> decent wheels? How
>
> long have such machines been around? And are they used for
> "decent" wheels?
>
> >>>>
> >>
> >>
>
> Yes, there are such machines, and they have been around for
> several years.
> Anytime you find a bicycle with traditional wheels from one
> of the large
> manufacturers, those wheels were 'machine built'! They <the
> machines> are very
> interesting to watch (they can lace a wheel fast!!) but their
> big limitation seems
> to be an inability to adequately stress relieve the wheel
> during the building
> process.
>
> Decent depends upon your definition as well as your exposure
> to truly 'well
> built' wheels. I would call them "decent" in many cases, but
> they have always
> (from my experience) needed "hands on finishing" to be worthy
> of serious use.
> Of course, I have found many of the boutique, and fairly
> expensive wheels, to
> be less than satisfactory as well!
>
> As Mr. H. Sachs puts it; YMMV........
>
> Best,
>
> Chuck Brooks
> Malta, NY
>
> _______________________________________________
>

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