The Wheels & Their Function on a Bicycle

Video Transcript

"This is Charles McMahon for Expert Village. I am going to tell you about the various components of the bicycle. If you want to get more information at a deeper level you can look at my college level textbook on merionmedia.com. Well, in this first segment we are going to look at the bicycle wheel and how it is put together. Now you have three components, you have the rim, you have the spokes and you have the hub. And all the way to the bicycle is on the front rim or front hub and the rear hub. So the bicycle, the weight on the hub, the hub is suspended from the rim by the spokes, a little bit like a circular suspension bridge. And you can do that because the spokes are in tension, in other words when the bicycle wheel is put together you stretch the spokes, so all of these spokes are in tension like the strings on a guitar you can twang them and you can hear that, you can hear that they are in tension. "