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bicyclesI do this book thing? And this bit is going to be in the next batch, but I'm posting it here first.
and
Probably the biggest thing I learned during March's adventure with the busted spoke was how much I didn't know about bike wheels. Research time, Dracula!
So anyway: the gal at City Bikes said I should look for a certain book on wheelbuilding. Whose name she didn't really recall, but there was a definite implication that it was THE book on wheelbuilding. After kicking cans around the internet for a while, I was pretty sure that the Jobst Brandt book was the one she was talking about: the dude was old knuckleheads with the late Sheldon Brown, he has a lot of other writing bouncing around on the web (including a bunch of stuff brought over from Usenet), and the fact that his book's in its third edition by now implies that it's a fairly major opus, as these things go. All copies were totally loaned out, though, plus Powell's didn't have a single one (!!!), so it was hold time. And I went ahead and borrowed the Schraner one while I was waiting, 'cause a little parallax never hurt anyone.
The two books are about as different as two books written by the type of person who would write a whole book about wheelbuilding can be. Schraner's is a floppy 1/4"-thick number with a stay-open binding, long on advice and short on theory; Brandt's is a hardback with appendices listing out the results of force calculations, and a shout-out in the acknowledgements to his bros at HP who wrote that Finite Element Method analysis program for him. Both writers have a tendency to lapse into endearing bitchiness—Schraner in the classic "I bin doin' this fer forty-five years, whippersnapper" mode (actual, albeit hazily-remembered, quote: "Serious wheelbuilders should ignore these faddish spoking patterns and leave them to the youth, although there's little harm in them; better for kids to be rolling spokes than rolling joints." NOT SHITTING YOU), and Brandt in a Todd Ingram-style "Hey, maybe if you knew the science" mode. Both books have blank notes pages in the back. Sometimes they disagree spectacularly (Schraner likes tying and soldering, Brandt says it adds no strength and is only any use if you're on a penny-farthing whose 30" spokes have a tendency to thrash and wreck havoc when they break), but they're mostly on the same page (e.g., don't ever do that radial spoking thing).
As you probably already picked up, Schraner's angle is that he's a master trying to pass on his hard-won knowledge as best he can. He doesn't shy away from straight-up telling you what brands of spokes or tools to use (just because he had to learn the hard way doesn't mean you have to, and impartiality be damned), and does things like listing polishing the hub before lacing among the crucial steps in the process, simply because a final wheel that's perfectly free of schmutz, even for just that moment before it's mounted in the forks, is a categorical good that ought to exist in the world.
Brandt is on a significantly different and much more renaissance-geekish mission: he aims to document and disseminate the current state of human knowledge about wire-spoked wheels, busting myths and backing his shit up with experiments and math whenever possible. There's still an eminently practical core here, but he kicks things off with basic theory, passes through materials engineering and some counterintuitive physics, and basically gets to brass tacks (well, nipples) the long way around. Which is why I enjoyed reading his book a lot more, I think: It bugged me that wheels were such a mystery, and I found it incredibly satisfying to gnaw on a project whose explicit goal is demystification.
I found both books oddly optimistic, for what seems such a dry subject: Schraner has an almost anachronistic conviction that it's possible for a human-built wheel to be—within the limits of the materials available—legitimately perfect, eventually succumbing to entropy or violence, but functioning beautifully 'til then and never needing adjustment; Brandt has the true geek's faith that his subject is ultimately knowable, and his trust in his audience's ability to keep up when it's time to talk Newtonian mechanics or materials science kept me encouraged when the going got, uh, a little opaque. Both of them made me want to build some fucking wheels. I don't think it's in the cards for another couple months, but it's totally on my list of things to do before I turn 30.
I haven't decided which of these two books I'll want at my side, though. The Brandt is the better general reference, but there's a certain appeal to the pared-down linearity of the Schraner, especially when your hands are coated in Tri-Flo and the apartment is littered with loose spokes. We'll see.
Gerd Schraner - The Art of Wheelbuilding (3/?)
and
Jobst Brandt - The Bicycle Wheel (3rd Edition) (4/?)
Probably the biggest thing I learned during March's adventure with the busted spoke was how much I didn't know about bike wheels. Research time, Dracula!
So anyway: the gal at City Bikes said I should look for a certain book on wheelbuilding. Whose name she didn't really recall, but there was a definite implication that it was THE book on wheelbuilding. After kicking cans around the internet for a while, I was pretty sure that the Jobst Brandt book was the one she was talking about: the dude was old knuckleheads with the late Sheldon Brown, he has a lot of other writing bouncing around on the web (including a bunch of stuff brought over from Usenet), and the fact that his book's in its third edition by now implies that it's a fairly major opus, as these things go. All copies were totally loaned out, though, plus Powell's didn't have a single one (!!!), so it was hold time. And I went ahead and borrowed the Schraner one while I was waiting, 'cause a little parallax never hurt anyone.
The two books are about as different as two books written by the type of person who would write a whole book about wheelbuilding can be. Schraner's is a floppy 1/4"-thick number with a stay-open binding, long on advice and short on theory; Brandt's is a hardback with appendices listing out the results of force calculations, and a shout-out in the acknowledgements to his bros at HP who wrote that Finite Element Method analysis program for him. Both writers have a tendency to lapse into endearing bitchiness—Schraner in the classic "I bin doin' this fer forty-five years, whippersnapper" mode (actual, albeit hazily-remembered, quote: "Serious wheelbuilders should ignore these faddish spoking patterns and leave them to the youth, although there's little harm in them; better for kids to be rolling spokes than rolling joints." NOT SHITTING YOU), and Brandt in a Todd Ingram-style "Hey, maybe if you knew the science" mode. Both books have blank notes pages in the back. Sometimes they disagree spectacularly (Schraner likes tying and soldering, Brandt says it adds no strength and is only any use if you're on a penny-farthing whose 30" spokes have a tendency to thrash and wreck havoc when they break), but they're mostly on the same page (e.g., don't ever do that radial spoking thing).
As you probably already picked up, Schraner's angle is that he's a master trying to pass on his hard-won knowledge as best he can. He doesn't shy away from straight-up telling you what brands of spokes or tools to use (just because he had to learn the hard way doesn't mean you have to, and impartiality be damned), and does things like listing polishing the hub before lacing among the crucial steps in the process, simply because a final wheel that's perfectly free of schmutz, even for just that moment before it's mounted in the forks, is a categorical good that ought to exist in the world.
Brandt is on a significantly different and much more renaissance-geekish mission: he aims to document and disseminate the current state of human knowledge about wire-spoked wheels, busting myths and backing his shit up with experiments and math whenever possible. There's still an eminently practical core here, but he kicks things off with basic theory, passes through materials engineering and some counterintuitive physics, and basically gets to brass tacks (well, nipples) the long way around. Which is why I enjoyed reading his book a lot more, I think: It bugged me that wheels were such a mystery, and I found it incredibly satisfying to gnaw on a project whose explicit goal is demystification.
I found both books oddly optimistic, for what seems such a dry subject: Schraner has an almost anachronistic conviction that it's possible for a human-built wheel to be—within the limits of the materials available—legitimately perfect, eventually succumbing to entropy or violence, but functioning beautifully 'til then and never needing adjustment; Brandt has the true geek's faith that his subject is ultimately knowable, and his trust in his audience's ability to keep up when it's time to talk Newtonian mechanics or materials science kept me encouraged when the going got, uh, a little opaque. Both of them made me want to build some fucking wheels. I don't think it's in the cards for another couple months, but it's totally on my list of things to do before I turn 30.
I haven't decided which of these two books I'll want at my side, though. The Brandt is the better general reference, but there's a certain appeal to the pared-down linearity of the Schraner, especially when your hands are coated in Tri-Flo and the apartment is littered with loose spokes. We'll see.
