Truing the Wheel

At some point the wheel is going to come out of alignment and no longer be straight, I'm not talking about the great side wards crease in the rim but the twist that makes it rub up against the brakes (don't get clever hub boys) every rotation.

Tools need

Nipple Key - make sure it fits as there are loads of sizes out there.

General

The layout of the Wheel is fairly simple, we have a rim which holds the tyre, and the Rim is held to the Hub via spoke's, these can be made from either Aluminium or steel, and yes Steel is heavier but you need less of them to hold the strain the is placed through them. The spokes are held into the Rim via Nipples, the Nipple is simple in design, it's basically a nut and the spoke a bolt. In the ideal world all your spokes and Nipples would be done up to the same tension and therefore the tension around the wheel would be constant.

Now the spokes usually leave the Rim from a fairly central position but to add to the strength of the wheel, spread side wards in order to meet of the edges of the Hub. This is usually done in an alternating fashion e.g one spoke left, one spoke right, one spoke left, one spoke right, e.t.c, e.tc.

This then gives some side wards pull on to the rim from either side of the hub to make a sort of triangle, and as we all know triangles are harder to knock over then boxes and pillars (2 dimensional).

The Spokes pull the rim towards there side of the rim so if all the Spokes and nipples on the left are done up tighter than the spokes on the left the wheel will be off centre to the left.

HOW TO DO IT

If you have a bike stand things will be a lot easier, but it's not totally necessary. Look down on the wheel and spin it, you should be able to locate the place that the wheel is out by how it passes the brakes or find something else to target the wheel against.

Now that you have locates the place that needs straightening mark it, this will allow you to find the spot again when you start spinning the wheel to see how straight the rim is after any alterations.

The one thing that you must not do is just tighten one spoke until the wheel becomes straight, this will place undue stress on one spoke and throw the entire wheel out. What you need to do is tighter on spoke slightly so that it pulls the rim in the desired direction, and then loosen the spokes either side of this spoke, on the other side of hub, Then tighten the next spokes along which are on the same side as the original spoke, this will have the effect of spreading the load across 5 spokes instead of one. Do it little by little and keep checking you work by spinning the wheel and looking down on it to see how far it has come back to centre. Keep repeating the processes until the rim is straight.

All spokes must be load bearing, so don't let of the spokes be undone too much.