The Bicycle Wheel 3rd Edition Author: Jobst Brandt | Language: English | ISBN:
0960723668 | Format: EPUB
The Bicycle Wheel 3rd Edition Description
- Hardcover: 150 pages
- Publisher: Avocet; 3rd edition (1993)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0960723668
- ISBN-13: 978-0960723669
- Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 7 x 5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Unlike some reviewers who would like to see Brandt describe and bless novel spoking patterns, I concur with his recommendation of traditional spoking. The traditional tangent tension-spoked wheel is one of the most elegant and efficient structures ever devised. A wheelbuilder may choose a rim, hub and spokes at will and so, construct wheels of many kinds that are not available commercially. With skill and care, an amateur may build wheels of professional quality. The traditional wheel may be built to the desired degree of ruggedness vs. weight, and if damaged, can often be made usable with an emergency repair or adjustment.
Brandt's advice faces challenges from within the bicycle industry, which is always looking for a new selling point. Wheels with low spoke counts, trendy now (2006) are more tolerable with deep-section aero rims than with shallow rims and can make sense for racers, who are willing to sacrifice reliability for a very slight increase in performance -- but for most bicyclists, it is much more important not to get stranded or crash than to increase speed by half a percent.
Some of the newer types of wheels may sell because they look different, but provide little actual advantage. Wheels with thick aluminum or polycarbonate spokes decrease weight slightly but at a major expense in air drag. Carbon-fiber spokes have a very poor record of reliability and safety, though carbon-fiber-epoxy composite material has been used successfully in rims and in single-piece formed wheels. Still, brake shoes wear carbon-fiber-epoxy quickly, so a metal braking surface is preferable. Don't get me talking about paired spokes, which make a wheel look as if it has fewer spokes -- but require a heavier rim, because longer rim segments are unsupported.
After having researched cycling for several months, it appears that The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt is considered to be THE standard reference on bicycle wheel building.
This book discusses how the wheel works, forces on the wheel, materials and designs of rims, spokes and hubs, truing, repair, and wheel building.
The book itself is nicely bound and printed, with extremely clear diagrams. Space is left on pages when necessary to ensure that the text doesn't get ahead of the figures, which can be rather annoying in something like a repair book.
For the most part, I am glad to have purchased this book, but was disappointed to find that a lot of the information in the book, such as wheel truing, materials, component design, and wheel building of a conventional 3-cross wheel, can be gleaned from the internet from such sites as those of Sheldon Brown. Some of the chapters in this book, such as the results of a finite element model analysis of the forces in a wheel, seem to be more unique to this book. Moroever, it is difficult to lay the computer down on the floor next to the wheel that you're building to guide you step-by-step, and the book had better illustrations than those I've seen on the web. Also, the information I mention above seems scattered around the internet, and this book brings them together in one reference.
For those who are expecting that The Bicycle Wheel will lead them to build exotic designs with the latest materials and lacing patterns, you will be disappointed. The author is a staunch believer that the bicycle wheel has been nearly perfected in the 3-cross lacing pattern with steel, cylindrical spokes, and that any "improvements" result in very minimal performance increase at the expense of stength.
The Bicycle Wheel 3rd Edition Preview
Link
Please Wait...