Hi Rich and others,

At Sibley Bike Depot in St. Paul, MN we've taught a number of successful wheel building classes. We usually have 8-14 participants. We usually have two instructors (pretty much for all of our classes) which includes one mechanic with reasonable wheel building experience and one mechanic who works at Quality Bike Products in the Wheel Building division (so he is truly an expert).

We've tried both used parts and new parts for our wheels; since we're usually low in 27" rear wheels, in our last class, we deconstructed 27" front rims (which are always in abundance) and rebuilt the rims with rear high flange Normandy hubs (in abundance off of old schwinns and others). This ended up not working super well - the single wall used rims did not rebuild well, and we had a couple wheels literally taco in my hands when I was attempting to de-tension spokes. We built a few wheels using the rear normandy hubs and new Sun CR18 rims - those worked way better. We used new spokes for all wheel builds.

In general, wheel building is pretty hard to teach, especially if you're using used rims. For future wheel building classes, I think we will build with all new parts - we've built a number of track wheels using dimension/formula hubs - it comes to around $65/wheel wholesale in parts but you can sell those wheels for $100-120, or put them on old road bikes and add value (especially if your shop is having trouble getting decent bikes donated for your sales floor). You can also charge $20 for parts/materials for the class to offset the investment in expensive new parts - that's what we do (registration is free for all classes, except for the parts/materials offset for wheel classes).

We have always let people purchase parts at retail prices and build wheels for themselves - it gives us a bit of revenue, and people get to build something that they can keep.

Jason Tanzman jtanzman@riseup.net

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Today's Topics:

1. Cutting Bike Locks (Scott Beardsley)
2. Anyone have a wheel building class curriculum? (Rich Points)
3. Re: Cutting Bike Locks (Stuart O Anderson)
4. Re: Cutting Bike Locks (reno bikes)
5. Re: Anyone have a wheel building class curriculum? (Sam Santos)

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Message: 1 Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:25:22 -0700 From: Scott Beardsley scott@sacbikekitchen.org Subject: [TheThinkTank] Cutting Bike Locks To: The Think Tank thethinktank@bikecollectives.org Message-ID: 67b59b4e0906231525r103fccd9w6f9b84b37540e9b8@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I'm involved with the Sacramento Bicycle Kitchen in California. We recently sealed a deal with the local Police to take 30-40 bikes/month off of their hands in return for working with troubled (meaning law-breaking) teens (something we're doing already anyways). I'm really excited about this and it'll bring even more exposure to our quickly growing shop/org along with giving us a ton of extra used parts. I have a question about breaking/cutting locks. Most of the bikes we will get still have locks (U-locks, chains, cables locks, etc) on them. What is the best way to remove these? Right now we are passing it on to the customer, but it'd be nice to at least have the proper tools if they wanted to DIY it. So far we have zero power tools in the shop. This might end up being the exception. What do we need to consider? Eye protection for everyone? Tell me how you handle these issues in your shop.

Thanks! Scott

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Message: 2 Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:27:16 -0600 From: Rich Points rich@communitycycles.org Subject: [TheThinkTank] Anyone have a wheel building class curriculum? To: The Think Tank thethinktank@lists.bikecollectives.org Message-ID: 4A4156C4.6030207@communitycycles.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"

Hey All, We're developing a wheel building class here at Community Cycles. We have a rough idea of what we'd like to do but we could use some help smoothing it out.

We're thinking the class would be three 2 hour sessions at a cost of $X to 6 - 8 students.

We've thought of two ways to go about supplies for the class. One would be to use recycled rims, hubs, nipples and maybe spokes. Another way would be to buy the parts from our wholesalers. The latter option means we could have control of what the class is working with. The former option could mean a lot more on the fly problem solving for the instructor and class but it'd be a lot cheaper for us and our students.
I'm leaning towards the new parts option because I think it'll provide the highest quality of instruction. What do you guys think?

Another question we're trying to figure out is what happens to the wheels that get built in the class. At our shop we're always in dire need of 700cc wheels. So we're thinking the class could build 700 wheels and they'd be used by the shop. However people taking the class may want to build wheels that they'd keep as their own. If we structure the class to just build 700 fronts we have more consistency and control. If we let folks build wheels for their own projects the class might have more general appeal but presents logistical and supplies hurdles.

Please let us know how your shop is teaching wheel building.

Ride On!