Dirty little secret of the wholesale distribution basic and replacement wheel business...many distributors for the various regions of the US including my own
do this...
Lots of distributors will call a 20 minute wheel built by an employee at home a "hand-built" wheel.
Typically the employee does 'em on spare time for roughly 8 bucks apiece - so they are encouraged to do at least 3 an hour. Some can do 4.
And of course they are passed off as a "better" substitute for the same machine- built wheel that was done in 10 minutes - 5 by hand and 5 by machine.
They'll often use two spoke wrenches at once - no lube on the seats - and literally start off with 2-3 complete turns right off the back before spending the final 5-10 minutes fine truing - and rarely get anywhere near +/- .002 inches or decent tension.
...slick advertising really...
I.e., like the machine-built wheels - they still need some finishing work.
My wheel business is basically:
The same machine built basic and replacement wheel but hand assembled, lubed, trued and tensioned, stress relieved, adjusted and spun, for a total build time
of at least an hour - often 1.5 hours for rear wheels.
Some shops and customers do want to know that the wheel coming off the shop hook is "truly" a "hand-built" wheel "quality"-wise even though it may be a cheap basic and replacement wheel.
For a shop that is really busy during the Summer - my wheels help 'em get low- end work out fast but right - so the higher-end and higher-revenue generating stuff such as overhauls and custom bikes don't get held up. I don't sell much during the winter - nor do I expect to.
Of course like most builders, I do high end wheels as well.
http://www.mrrabbit.net/
=8-)
Robert Shackelford San Jose, CA USA
p.s., If the link above is not appropriate Dale, let me know.
Quoting Harvey Sachs <hmsachs@verizon.net>:
> Jim Papadopoulos, my wife, and I visited the Schwinn works in Chicago in
> the Fall of 1974. At that time, assembly of run-of-the-mill steel-rim
> wheels was a two part process. Humans spoked the wheels. They were then
> put on a machine that mechanically tensioned the spokes. It was
> certainly "good enough". This had been going on for a long time, so I'm
> pretty sure it was not even computer-controlled.
>
> I believe that Jim eventually patented a concept that would do the final
> tensioning in a single pass around the wheel.
>
> Harvey Sachs
> mcLean va usa
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Jerry Moos wrote:
> Kind of amazing that someone could build 6 wheels an hour. I guess one
> could get pretty fast at spoking them, but the tensioning is what takes
> time. I've read a few places that In The Day inexpensive wheels were
> tensioned "by machine", but I've never seen a description or photos of
> the machines used. Is JB using some sort of tensioning machine? If
> these guys are spoking and tensioning 6 wheels an hour by hand and
> sustaining that all day, its amazing they can even get them true enough
> to not drag on the brake pads. I'll bet some of these guys get good
> enough that they could probably build some really excellent wheels if
> they were ever given the time and decent pay for doing so.
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
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