[analog31]

I build my own wheels too. There's another reason for these kinds of comments, which is that a lot of cyclists have been persuaded that wheelbuilding (and other kinds of bike work) is a deep philosophical mystery requiring decades of experience and a shop full of specialized tooling. Yet people have maintained their own bikes satisfactorily with basic tools for more than a century.

This happens in any technical discipline -- two people will disagree diametrically on the amount of gear and technique needed, yet achieve identical results. And nobody knows why.

So my own reaction is that equipment like this could benefit someone who is supporting competitive cyclists (including themselves), such a person knows who they are, and has already built a few wheels. But "the rest of us" sometimes just need a reassurance that much more modest tooling will get you to a satisfactory wheel that will last a long time. Likewise for routine periodic maintenance such as tensioning and truing. My goal is decent truth, zero spoke breakage, minimal re-truing later on.

[pixelbreaker]

Yeah, for Pro mechanics who are paid to build the absolute best, yes perhaps it's useful. But for the rest of us, nah.

[jacquesm]

Even then I doubt it. The best wheelbuilders are the tradional ones.

Here is a fantastic, compact and very much to the point guide on how to spoke wheels (in dutch, google translate is your friend):

http://www.m-gineering.nl/techdex.htm

[analog31]

Likewise violin makers.

I wonder if the common thread is that these activities require a high level of skill but don't pay very well and are tiny markets, so there's no way to do the R&D needed to automate production.

[jacquesm]

There exist automatic wheel spoking machines, typically used for mass produced bikes. If I buy a new bike the first thing I do is check the spoke tension because for sure it will be a huge mess. The next is to check the fork bearings because those will usually be too tight (you can feel the individual balls) or too loose (a clicking sound when you hold the front brake and rock the bike back and forth). The joke here is that when you buy a bike it's more work than building one yourself because you first have to take it apart again. That's obviously not true but I've seen some pretty bad stuff come out of factories (brand names too...).

One recent weird thing on a brand new bike was a set of spokes that had the inside and the outside exchanged leading to all of the spokes rubbing gaps in each other. I still wonder what the story was about that one, it makes absolutely no sense at all that an error like that would be made in a mass produced bike and no sane bike mechanic would spoke a wheel like that.

[analog31]

I've seen videos of wheel making "by machine." There is still some manual work, such as part or even all of lacing. If a wheel is laced "off," then it's pretty much downhill from there.

By day I'm an industrial physicist, and I've designed systems for doing automated mechanical adjustment. There's an 80/20 rule, where tightening the specs can dramatically increase the cycle time. So, you can make more widgets per hour if you relax the specs.

[schoen]

I remember taking a bike maintenance class where the instructor said that mechanical wheelbuilding has not reached the level of quality of hand wheelbuilding (maybe he even said "has not approached").

Since this part of the thread is kind of about that question, I would like to ask: how come? Isn't machines' consistency something that could be very useful here? And if not, couldn't tools like the one presented by the original post help the machines reach a high standard?