I enjoy riding my bicycle, whether its my mountain bike or road bike. But, I can’t get enough of working on bikes.
When my wife and I were first married, we only had one car and we both were working. Since she worked further away, I had to choose between riding a bike or getting a bus pass. I chose to get the bike. A white Trek 1.1, that I thought was the coolest thing I have ever owned. I started cleaning it and taking it apart, and I realized bike maintenance wasn’t so mysterious. Ever since that time, I have had an obsession with working on bikes.
Fast forward 8 years, and I am trying to put together my first full suspension mountain bike for under $1000 dollars. I bought some wheels for my bike on Facebook Marketplace and after a few rides noticed that the back wheel didn’t spin freely. When I took it apart, I discovered that the axle and hub basically had exploded on the inside. I didn’t want to buy another wheel because of my budget. At first I didn’t even consider rebuilding the wheel because I have always thought you need a black belt in bike mechanics to do that. I also didn’t have the right tools (wheel truing stand, dishing tool, spoke tension meter). For some reason I had convinced myself that the wheel truing stand was the most critical tool needed in order to build a wheel. I did come across some articles that mentioned you could use a zip-tie on the bike frame to true a wheel. So I figured that is what I would do and went ahead and purchased a hub on Ebay.
When the hub arrived, I took apart my old wheel with a cheap spoke wrench I had from the first mechanic set I ever bought. I followed the Park Tool article on how to rebuild a wheel which was super helpful. However, when I got to the part about dishing the wheel, I realized I may have overlooked how important this step is in the wheel building process. In fact, I think it is the most important tool. So I was stuck again. A dishing tool isn’t cheap, and I would most likely never use it again so I couldn’t justify the cost. But then I got an idea, I could just make one out of wood, or maybe Legos?? I ran up to my son’s room and started building a Lego that could bridge the full wheel. Then I put a sliding piece that would tell me how close to center the hub was. I brought it down to the garage and it worked like a freaking charm. I was so pumped about it. Plus it was cool to do with Legos, you know?
So there you have it, no need to spend $70 bucks on a dishing tool if you have Legos lying around! No need to mention that the Legos probably end up costing the same haha but it’s for creative development and stuff like that…
I did end up buying a spoke tension meter because it was fairly cheap and I felt like that was a good safety check for my wheel building. I found a relatively cheap one on Amazon here. Spoke tension meter