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Understanding your wheel before we rebuild it
Five articles and one tool, written from the questions that come up most often in the workshop. None of it is needed in order to order: it is here for anyone who wants to understand what they are sending, and what will come back.
Spoke length calculator
Our wheelbuilders' own tool, open to everyone. The ERD of our 57 rim/diameter pairs is already filled in: you only enter the four dimensions of your hub, and you get both lengths, left and right, to a tenth of a millimetre.
Open the calculator
Buckled rim: true it or replace it?
A lateral wobble can be pulled back, so can a hop — but not always. Rims come through the workshop that a good session puts back in line for two years, and others whose aluminium has already worked too hard. The five signs that tell them apart, and the one we look at first.
Is your hub still good?
It is the part we ask you to keep, so it is the part that decides everything. Three checks you can make at home in two minutes — lateral play, bearing noise, the state of the freehub body — before the wheel goes into a box.
E-bike wheels: why the spoking changes everything
An e-bike carries the same tyre and the same rim as a muscle bike, and yet its wheel is not built the same way. Motor torque, mass and braking call for different spokes and different tensions. What changes, and why it shows in use.
Axle load, max load: the two figures that decide
Data sheets give two numbers, axle load and system weight, and they get confused all the time. Which one concerns you depending on whether you ride loaded, two-up or with a trailer — and why two bikes of the same weight do not read them the same way.
Why we use Mach1 rims
A partnership, not a supplier listing: Mach1 designs and manufactures the rims and the spokes, Velox builds them into wheels. Design office, test rig, eight manufacturing steps — what lies behind twenty of the twenty-three rim models we use.
Next article
It is being written at the workshop, between two builds. It will take its place here.
Your rim is finished. Your hub is not.
Send us the bare hub: we take the dimensions, calculate, cut and assemble your wheel. New rim, spokes and nipples, back with you in 48 to 72 hours.
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