Building The Perfect Wheel

 It's not for the faint of heart, but once the skill is learned, building bicycle wheels can be almost as easy as lacing up a pair of hiking boots. I remember sitting on the living room floor of my coal company house in Clarion, Pennsylvania with a set of Hi-E hubs, a box of glinting DT spokes and a dark gray pair of Mavic tubular rims. Now you would use high end clincher rims, but back in those days all the cool kids had tubular rims which required gluing silk cased tires to the running surface. And I desperately wanted to ride with the cool kids.

Under my ex husband's disapproving eye, I began the task. One spoke through the hub and into the rim at the valve hole; screw the nipple on. Skip four holes to the right and repeat. Do this all the way around the rim. Flip the wheel over. Same thing. Then begin the intricate pattern of spoke heads in, spoke heads out, weaving over and under in a three cross pattern, screwing on nipples until the wheel is built. A good wheelsmith can assemble a wheel in as fast as thirty minutes. As I recall it took me three hours and any number of bottles of bitter Lord Chesterfield ale to build, go back, fix, rebuild, find another mistake and so on. But finally my wheel was done, gleaming like a blade in the light from the floor lamp. I checked the spoke tension, popped the wheel into the truing stand and after a handful of tweaks my wheel was ready to accept its glue and Clement tubular tire. In fact, I had done such a good job that after the initial truing, I didn't have to dial those wheels in ever again; they lasted longer than the marriage. I sold them after my divorce, and I believe that somewhere in Western New York those wheels still are turning.

A racing bicycle is a wonder of physics, which is why physicists love bikes: witness the grin on Einstein's face as he pedaled his bike around college campuses. Newton's laws are everywhere, and, when violated, bloodily so. Gravity. Centrifugal force. Gyroscopic precession. Leverage. Balance. Speed. Power. There is a whole universe whirling in a bicycle pointed down a Pennsylvania mountain road. And there is nothing like being folded into a tight wedge between the handlebars and the saddle, nose just above the angle of the stem and watching the speedometer edge above sixty miles per hour; at that point the wheels sing over the pavement, slicing through the air in a high, thin soprano. It is as close to flying as I have ever been.

The bicycle wheel exists in tension and compression: the bicycle is both supported and suspended by the spider web of spokes. Which is not unlike the human condition: we exist in stress, stretched and pushed to unknown speeds. Sometimes we fail, collapsing in the cobbles; and sometimes we soar, singing, flying down through the green darkness of the Pennsylvania forest, chasing the mosaic of sun and shadow.