How to Straighten a Bicycle Wheel

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm Shane Jackson with Evolution Bike Company. We have been in business for about three years. I have about twenty years experience in cycling. Today we're going to talk to you about wheel truing. When you have a wheel say you hit a rock real hard or you jump the jump and cased it, you're going to knock your rim out of true. The best way to fix this is on a truing standing. You can do it on your bicycle using your brake pads but it is a little bit more harder. Right now what we're going to do is we're going to spin the wheel and you hear that noise, that noise is indicating that the rim is scrubbing on one side of the calipers and on this one it is going to be scrubbing on your right side so to tighten this to fix this you're going to tighten or loosen depending on which way it is scrubbing, this one we're going to tighten and you're going to pick the right size spoke wrench that you need and we're going to tighten the opposite sides so we're going to tighten the left spoke. That's going to make it not make any noise on that side. At this point we're going to just barely turn our calipers in until it makes noise again. Again it is on the right side so you're going to tighten the left spoke. As you start to tighten more on one side of the rim you're going to have to start loosening on the other side. You don't want to over tighten one side particular. Again left spoke is going to tighten. This one is pretty loose so we're going to tighten it two or three turns. Also you can tell by looking straight down the rim you can see the rim move. Again we're going to tighten the right, the left side again. This one is also really loose. Now we're going to loosen the right side of where we are going to squeeze the spokes and now we're going to tighten the left side again. Now your wheel is straight. Lots of times you also can occur a hop in the rim. At this point you'll just turn your calipers back like this, pull them backwards, turn them in and see if there is a hop just by moving it closer to the back side of the rim. To get the hop out of the wheels you are going to put your calipers to the very edge of the rim on the back side and you want to listen for intermittent noises. At this point you would tighten both spokes on left and right side at the same time equal turns to pull the rim forward off the calipers."