On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 07:06:06 +1000, daveornee
wrote:


Wrote:
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 17:13:50 GMT, Ted
wrote:


You'll find a reasonable tutorial on the basics of wheel alignment
and
wheelbuilding at www.bikewebsite.com
Have fun!
- Jeff -

Nothing at all about stress relieving.

Pressing on the rim, against the axle end, will untwist spokes but it
is
difficult to press hard enough to relieve internal stresses in
individual spokes that way. Better to add a step: wearing heavy
gloves, grasp pairs of spokes and squeeze hard, repeating all around
the
wheel. Done properly, this will practically eliminate the need for
later truing and the spokes will last a long, long, time.

Dear Ted,

Outside of posts on rec.bicycles.tech and references to
Jobst's book, do you know of any studies, tests, or web
pages that address what we're calling "stress relieving" and
"stress relief"?

The quotation marks are used only to broaden the question,
since there may be other names and methods for
spoke-squeezing, as well as other claims for the process is
supposed to do to the spokes.

Sheldon Brown, for example, quotes Jobst, but gives the
spokes a twist with a smooth crank arm instead of squeezing
them:

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html#seating

It would be interesting to find out if Japanese Keirin
bicycle mechanics squeeze or twist spokes. Maybe John Dacey
knows?

Carl Fogel

http://yarchive.net/bike/stress_relieve.html

Might be worth a look.

Dear Dave,

Yes, that's a typical 1998 rec.bicycles.tech thread with the
usual suspects. It's one of the exchanges that led me to
wonder about the matter. Here's a fair example:

That is why I asked for references to hard scientific papers, a
mathematical explanation or other such research.

The book gives both an explanation and experimental methods by which
you can convince yourself of these effects. Had someone written about
it previously, I would not have written "the Bicycle Wheel". Much of
what the book contains could previously not be found in any
literature. The work of Karl Wiedemer is cited.

Your book contained no mathematics on this topic, no results of
proper controlled experiments on the cause of the effects and no
references that I could look up. In particular, I was extremely
surprised that it didn't seem to contain any references to where
you had published your analyses and experiments in the scientific
literature.

Well! I guess that means it is all wrong as you state.

Yes, I have tried doing a literature search, but found nothing.

As you see, I found more than you. With help I located Karl
Wiedemer's publication on the subject. Prof. Wiedemer, now
retired, did his analysis at the same time I did and he also had
no references because it was new work in a field that had progressed
without analysis for a long time. Prof. Pippard in England wrote
extensively on the subject but never discovered the mode of
wheel loading and deflections that I and Wiedemer presented.
As I said, I made the analysis by measurement and was rejected
by professors of engineering. When I presented the finite element
analysis, these same people chose to change the subject and get
back to "serious" work.

[ and so on]

Googling for "karl wiedemer" produces four other pages, all
in German, one on safety devices for coal dust, one on blast
furnace slag, one on the history of some club from 1896, and
two other in pdf format that Google does not offer to
translate.

Spoke-squeezing is an intriguingly mysterious subject to
research. I remain agnostic, wavering one way and the other,
but haven't seen any experimental data or analyses involving
bicycle spokes. If you have the 3rd edition, perhaps you
could peek at the Wiedemer stuff and give me your thoughts
on it?

Carl Fogel