Fine Tuning a Bicycle Wheel

Video Transcript

"To now our fine adjusting the wheel. By dialing in the feeler gages here, we want to look at the wheel for lateral adjustment that is true, but also the round which is the up and down. So as we roll the wheel around after our secondary tension, we see that the wheel needs some adjustment to get close to round. So we can start adding and subtracting tension on individual spoke nipples, very delicately, you just want to do a half a turn or a full turn at a time. We're well pass radical adjustments, and now are fine adjusting the wheel. I can determine which spokes to adjust, by sighting the rim versus this feeler here. For example, as I roll the wheel around, I can fine tune my turning stand here to get the adjuster nice and close so we can see what we're going. As I roll the wheel around here, you notice that this low spot, the rim dips and moves to the left, it goes down and to the left. So, I'm going to add tension to this opposing spoke, and you'll see how it affects the true. We start to get these individual spots closer to true. Now this is a fine tuning process so it takes repeated small adjustments to do this correctly. And again we have a low spot here and it also moves to the left, so we've decided to tension these spokes. There's to of them here that are in that neighborhood, that are just a little bit off, so we'll add oh just a half a turn or a turn to dial those guys in. Now as I sight it a little bit closer, I see I've also got a little bit of up and down work to do. You can see this alright, there's a spot where the rim actually goes up and little high. There's too much tension in this entire area, and yet it's relatively straight laterally. So we're actually going to release some of that tension on that high spot. And our goal is to get both the laterally true wheel and a round wheel at the same time."