36 times "a little bit" is a lot.

[uart]

And 72 times "a little bit" is even more!

How many people guessed the context of this post from the title? Most people who have restored old wheels I guess.

Pretty much any time I've ever done something to clean up the spokes on an old wheel in order to salvage them,without going to the bother of a full rebuild, I've always ended up frustrated with how time consuming it is. Most times I've end up wishing that I'd just cut them out and rebuilt those suckers properly in the first place, as the time taken is about the same.

Can anyone else relate to this?

[P!N20]

That’s why I only ever have 32/64.

[Clydesdale Scot]

32 and 40 are the correct numbers.

[uart]

32 and 40 are the correct numbers.

That's interesting. The majority of my old wheels from 70s/80s are 36 spoke. I've got a couple of 32 spokes wheels, but I think they were 90s.

As you can guess from my rant, I spent yesterday trying to clean up an old pair without fully rebuilding them. It ended up being a whole crap ton of work for a really really shirty result. Oh well.

[Clydesdale Scot]

easier to clean when the spokes don't exist
Airlite Continental hubs 32H and 40H free/fixed by philip.knight, on Flickr

[WyvernRH]

32 and 40 are the correct numbers.

That's interesting. The majority of my old wheels from 70s/80s are 36 spoke. I've got a couple of 32 spokes wheels, but I think they were 90s.

The 32/40 thing, apart from being a good engineering analysis of the structure required, also meant with the correct crossings you could have the same length spokes in both wheels. Very important if you were touring on on a restricted budget as most folk were in the 50's.
36x36 really only started becoming popular as a 'production line' thing when automated wheel building started up in the early 60's (or a bit earlier in Europe)

Richard

[Thoglette]

you could have the same length spokes in both wheels.

I guess that required many hours of family fun with a spoke length calculator and rim/hub catalogues?

Or were hubs sold in pairs with the correct dimensions to allow this?

[queequeg]

you could have the same length spokes in both wheels.

I guess that required many hours of family fun with a spoke length calculator and rim/hub catalogues?

Or were hubs sold in pairs with the correct dimensions to allow this?

Some hub designs actually already incorporate this, with the flange on one side having a large PCD than the other. For example, my Hope Pro2 EVO hubs have a 2mm PCD difference between the left and right side, and flange offset on the front and rear hubs is the same (these are disc hubs). It resulted in a spoke calculation that ends up producing the same rounded length spoke for both sides of both wheels, as long as you build both wheels with the same cross lacing and spoke count.

[WyvernRH]

you could have the same length spokes in both wheels.

I guess that required many hours of family fun with a spoke length calculator and rim/hub catalogues?

Or were hubs sold in pairs with the correct dimensions to allow this?

Well yes, assuming same type of rims of course front and rear, remember that 5 speeds was the most you were going to get at the back in those days so you could safely use the shorter length spoke at the back as a replacement and IIRC the crossing difference matched up the front to the back. This is still an approximation to the wheel building perfectionist of course, depending on the hub and the front fork width you might be a mm or so out but less didn't really matter and more was dispatched with the small hand file most folk carried in the touring tool kit.

Richard