Straighten a bike wheel with the simple "Gt" method (truing)

Hey before I even start I want to give a shout out to RJ the bike guy I typically don't do bike videos as most of you already know but in this case I think I have something to add because it's difficult to remember sometimes when you're truing up a wheel just how to do it and if you don't do it for a long time it's easy to forget how so I'm going to in this video give you a way to remember how to tighten spokes correctly not professionally but enough to get you by I call this method the GT method and it has nothing to do with GT bicycles it's just a way to remember so I hope you enjoy this so again this is just for a passive bike repair people if you really want to go into the details go look for RJ the bike guy his videos are superb and they cover every topic on a bicycle they've been an invaluable resource to me and I rebuild bikes all the time before we get into spokes there's an idea that I want you to consider did you ever hear the expression you can't push a rope yeah you can't change the nature of things a chain is that way no matter how strong it is you just can't use it to push anything a spoke is exactly the same way you have to think of these as ropes that are under tension they're drawing tight and they're pulling in the direction that they're intended to they're not pushing per se okay okay I know get on with it all you need to do this is a spoke wrench that's appropriate to your spokes and a number-two pencil and now I'm going to put this back together and I'll show you how to do it okay well well the neighbor was cutting the grass I ended up straightening both the wheels but that's okay because I need to explain the concept to you more it's better that you understand just me showing you twisting the spokes isn't gonna help you so step one turn the bike upside down let's establish a fixed point of reference let's pretend that you are the hub your eyes are here and your arms are to spokes and this will be the rim notice that some of the spokes point to the left and some of them point to the right and they alternate back and forth in this way you can think of them as left's and rights so in the example think of this spoke as your left hand and this one as your right so if you tighten a left spoke it makes it shorter and draws the rim this way and if you tighten the right spoke it has the opposite effect the idea is to get it straight and because we want to keep all of our spokes nice and tight because if they're all under tension then the forces are distributed equally and forget all that the important thing is you want all of your spokes to have about the same amount of tightness so you shouldn't tighten a spoke on this side without loosening a corresponding amount that's similar on this side so I guess the idea here is balance so in general loosen first and then tighten let's start with the simplest case we're gonna use our brake pads as our reference point oh yeah step zero make sure your rim is nice and clean because we're gonna put a pencil mark on it ideally this is the part that you already know wherever the pencil touches that means the rim is pressed this way at the center of the pencil line that has been drawn on the rim [Music] I don't know if you can hear it but what I'm doing is finding the line that exists where it starts and where it stops and the closest that I can determine to the center is somewhere around here so if I were to draw the line you would find exactly the center of that line and mark it up here on the rim and now I'll show you why I call this the GT method because as soon as I locate that point I turn it into a T and then I write G T that XI the G is an arrow that indicates which way I move this or which way I rotate the spoke in order to tighten the spoke this direction tightens and since it's on an aluminum rim you can wipe this right away with just some alcohol in a paper towel the center just so happens to land right next to a spoke that's on this side of the wheel and if we were to loosen a spoke that's on this side of the wheel it would reduce the bump by moving allowing the wheel to move back that way as long as we were to tighten this one and this one around it you can't think of you can't think of a neck centricity that's in a wheel as just at a single point it's more like a curve all bumps are curves it could be a really long curve that takes that's played out over the course of five or seven spokes or it could just be a simple one that's just in three in this most basic case this spoke is about at the middle so I'll just loosen this a little bit to let the bump have room to come out and then I'll tighten these two a little bit to help draw the bump back if this is your first attempt at wheel straightening keep yourself limited to three spokes at a time and then check your progress if you don't like what you see you can always undo what you've done as you get better you can level up and try adding additional spokes by moving up to five but maybe steps at first my first adjustment on the center will be to loosen it by a half turn and then I'll tighten the two spokes on the sides of it by a quarter turn each again loosen first a half turn and now tighten on each side of it by about a quarter turn you can also go by feel with the tighten a little bit that's a pretty high tolerance for a bicycle that I paid $20 for on Craigslist but you can you can just keep repeating that same process as many times as you need to and how I would go about further refining this and I probably will since I'm already sitting here doing it is I would jump to the next to the other side and just repeat the procedure from the other side again just three spokes at a time there's no reason to risk doing more than that because this is still just a crude sort of DIY straightening but it can really really get you close if you pay close attention now there's one other aspect to this technique that I need to explain to you though as I've said I work from side to side looking for the worst bumps and I just keep working them down so this was the worst bump on this side then I would go to the worst bump on that side you can work both positive and negative bumps but let's just keep it simple at first but still I need to tell you that in this case the center was on one of these spokes that pull from this side if the center were close to this instead which is a spoke that pulls from the other side then I would do it slightly differently instead I would have loosened these two first and then tightened this spoke okay I don't think I need to go into any further complexity I think you get the idea I also think that you'll learn as you go just through experience and you'll be able to become more efficient at doing it a lot of it really is just practice and you'll refine your technique to start with that basic three spoke approach and I promise you'll get better as you start to internalize it and think about it as for this $20 bicycle yeah I will call it done I got it to shift into all 21 gears it breaks really and it's not bad it's not bad oh I actually really like its geometry um don't get too excited it wasn't the greatest deal in the world because I had to completely replace the bearings in the bottom bracket and also the the rear hub it just it was a rusty mess so there was lots of rust but all told aside from labor this is a steal for 20 bucks if this was useful to you please let me know it Viking is one of my passions but I don't really make videos about it if you enjoy them tell me and maybe I'll make more see you on the next subject

Channel: pocket83²

Views: 525,607

Rating: 4.8483658 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, puzzles, mathematics, geometry, physics, toys, tricks, hacks, tips, life, hack, ideas, interesting, shop, garage, math, carpentry, engineering, science, biology, philosophy, bike, bicycle, true, tire, wheel, truing, bmx, mtb, spoke, spokewrench, fix, restore, build

Id: zcwVsxnF6pc

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 13 2018