Make or buy wheels?

With the frame on order (a six week lead time for the S&S coupler installation) I've just been sitting around thinking about other parts of the building process.  We've already figured out that we'll be using 26" wheels, but the question then is - which ones?

More importantly, should I...
   ...choose wheel sets from the internet,
   ...get someone to build some wheels for me,
   ...or build them myself?

Back to the interwebs.

Surprisingly (sarcasm font implied), there are arguments over what is the best book on building bike wheels.

The encyclopedia of wheel building is apparently the book by Jobst Brandt: The Bicycle Wheel, which is now in its 3rd edition. Brandt is an engineer who is apparently quite opinionated (imagine that) and calls BS on much of the trendy wheel design in industry. Although I liked a lot of the book reviews and the fact that Brandt gets into the real engineering of wheels - I decided to pass on this book as I wanted to just get down to a "what should I do" level.

After some mucking about, I ended up getting Professional Guide to Wheel Building, by Roger Musson.  This is an e-book (which could be handy on the road), that you can buy directly from Roger at www.wheelpro.co.uk.  It was about $15 (I haven't looked at what foreign exchange rate we got - the book is priced on line in English pounds, so your price may vary). I've read the book through (once) and it seems to be a no-nonsense guide to putting together a wheel, without a lot of extraneous stuff.

Seems to me the best reason for building the wheels myself is that I'll then really understand my wheels, so if there's a problem while touring I should be able to fix them myself.  The best argument against is that I might make a complete mess of it.

After reading Musson's book, I think I can do this - with a little patience and probably a fair bit of time.  The good thing about the process is that if you screw it up you just unlace all the spokes and start over.  I'm looking forward to building my own wheels. I'll let you know how it goes.

Tire size

One of the questions you have to deal with in building a touring bike is what size of wheels to use. My current bike is a standard road bike, with 700 mm wheels - so my first thought was just to stick with what I know.  Then I opened up the web (often a mistake).  Seems like wheel size brings out quite the collection of "expert" opinion and associated invective. I can't say that either the partisans of 26" wheels or 700 mm wheels were convincing.  The basic argument for smaller wheels (26" - standard mountain bike wheels) is two-fold: (1) for size XX components (e.g. spokes, rim thickness, etc) the smaller wheel is stronger, and (2) in countries that don't have bike shops serving road racers, replacements for tubes, tires and rims for 26" wheels are really common while 700 mm stuff is rarer.  The arguments for 700 mm wheels seem to be mostly that the 26" wheel arguments are bullshit and your mother wears army boots. Actually the main argument for 700 mm wheels seems to be associated with the smoothness of ride over potholes due to the larger diameter - I was thinking a bit about what the actual difference would be in the arc length of either tire and I'm not convinced - I'll agree that a 10" or 14" wheel would feel really different over potholes, but I can't see the difference between the 26" and 700 mm rims being significant compared to the rim width, tire diameter, and inflation pressure.

Then I started reading about the (relatively) new 29'er wheels (which are really 700 mm rims that can handle wider tires) and decided to shut down my computer.

In the end, Surly Bikes came to our rescue - for short people (frames smaller than 56 cm) the Disc Trucker is only designed for 26" wheels. This makes a lot of sense to me, because the larger wheels on smaller frames can lead to an "overlap" problem - where turning the front wheel at low speed puts the tire into the rider's foot if the pedal is all the way forward - not something you really want to happen with fully loaded panniers.  So we'll be using 26" wheels.

Bike Frame Measurements

In a prior post, I mentioned that it was measurements of the bike frame (for small riders) that drove our decision to go with the Surly Disc Trucker.  Just for my own records, here's the Surly measurements for both the Disc Trucker and World Troller.

Bike frame measurement definitions 

(from Surly Bikes)

Disc Trucker Measurements (inches)

World Troller measurements (inches)

Measurements from my Felt road bike (inches)

To be added later

Touring bike frame

So the frame and fork is obviously the place to start when building a touring bike. We started with the idea that we wanted disc brakes - my old hands with weak grip strength don't need to be yanking back on a v-pull with a heavily loaded bike. If you aren't up on bike building (e.g., me) the choice of conventional brakes or disc is built into the frame (although some frames can handle both). After a fair bit of mucking about, I settled on one of two possibilities, both from Surly Bikes.  They sell the World Troller frame with the S&S couplers (see previous post) built in at the factory and the Disc Trucker without the couplers (so we would have to get them installed after market).

The World Troller seemed like the no brainer option, but once we started looking at frame sizing, we found that we'd rather have the Disc Trucker. The Troller is designed for absolutely everything, which would be great if we were doing adventure touring with lots of off-road segments. But we're planning to be more conventional, mostly on roads and (at worst) gravel bike paths. The main drawback for the Troller is that they don't have as many size options. Furthermore, the Disc Trucker has 2" longer chainstays and a slightly greater BB drop. The former, in theory, should provide more stability with a longer wheelbase - but more importantly provides extra heel clearance to help keep you from hitting panniers. The BB drop is more obscure, but it puts your bottom bracket (where you pedal around) a little closer to the ground so you get a little lower center of gravity. Of course, if you go screaming around a corner with a deep lean and with your pedal at bottom stroke, the larger BB drop could cause a bit of a problem.  But being short people, the real critical factor was the frame sizing options, and the Disc Trucker simply fit both of us better.

Anyway, the Disc Trucker seemed like what we wanted, but it doesn't come with S&S couplers so the big question was whether we could get a reasonable price on installation.  We found a good deal by talking with Bilenky Cycles in Philadelphia. They're a Surly dealer as well as a machine shop with experience in installing the couplers. They're working on our first frame now. Check back in November to see what it looks like.

Getting started

A couple months ago we started thinking about doing some bike touring. We were in Europe in August and did some one-day bike rentals - quite enjoyed it (despite the sketchy bikes). We've done multi-day supported road bike rides in the past (Ride the Rockies most notably), so I figured it wouldn't take too much to get used to carrying gear. My first instinct was just to buy a couple inexpensive touring bikes and go for it. Then I started looking into the costs to fly bikes between the U.S. and Europe. It doesn't take but 3 trips and the bike baggage fees will dwarf the cost of a cheap bike.

After some looking about, it appears that the best option (for us, anyway) is bikes with S&S Couplers that allow a bike frame to be split into 2 pieces and the entire bike packed up into a case that an be checked as regular luggage. After looking at some bikes that are sold with couplers installed (which isn't very many), we decided (well, I decided and got reluctant/skeptical agreement from my better half - who has watched a number of projects get stalled only half-finished) to build our tour bikes from components.

As I started down this path, I realized there's a lot of little decisions made along the way, which really should be jotted down in a notebook for future reference. Hence, this blog.