Truing a Bike Wheel for Dummies

Spoked bicycle wheel

If we were forced to choose one single thing about internet dumbassery that drives our staffers nuts, it would probably be those DIY articles that go into great detail when it comes to defining terminology and then neglect detailed instructions for the steps. That's why we've brought back Nichole Liandi of the Demand Media (now Leaf Group) stable of freelancers. Today. Nichole's going to explain "How to Tighten Bike Spokes"¹ (later sold to LovetoKnow for their niche spot Trails.com). Well, sort of...

Nichole's been on the award podium before, having accumulated a total of six previous DotD awards at three different Leaf Group sites, one of which already demonstrated a tenuous grasp on cycling. As usual, the history graduate (not the history of cycling, we suspect) found and reworded a reasonably accurate source. According to Liandi, the steps are simple:

Place the wheel in a truing stand or turn the bike upside down Tighten your spokes by sliding a spoke wrench onto the spoke's nipple. The nipple is the small metal jacket that covers the spoke at the point the spoke enters the rim. Turn the spoke wrench to the right to tighten and to the left to loosen. Tighten or loosen the spokes so that you have even tension all around the rim. Spin the wheel in the truing stand or on the bike to see if it spins true and doesn't wobble. If the wheel wobbles out of true, tighten the corresponding spokes to establish a smooth motion. After carefully explaining what a spoke nipple is, Liandi then blithely glosses over a couple of important points in the truing process (we assume she does this because she's never actually trued a wheel):

• How do you determine "that you have even tension all around the rim"?
• When a wheel wobbles, which are "the corresponding spokes"?
• And while we're at it, how does turning the bike upside down help tighten spokes? (we know -- does Nichole?) 

The answers take more than the 200-500 word DMS wanted out of Nichole, so we're just going to refer you to someone who has actually done this, the late Sheldon Brown; though there are many articles out there written by people who know what they're talking about. We can tell you with absolute certainty that Sheldon's bicycle articles will never pick up a Dumbass of the Day award. Liandi, on the other hand? She's getting number seven.

¹ The original has been deleted by the new owner of Trails.com, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   trails.com/how_12820_tighten-bike-spokes.html

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