On 6/8/2021 10:50 AM, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, June 8, 2021 at 5:50:27 AM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
On 6/7/2021 9:17 PM, pH wrote:
On 2021-06-07, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/6/2021 10:08 PM, jbeattie wrote:

It was hard to screw-up 120mm/36 spoke wheels on SC Mod 52 or other robust rims of the era.

Apart from instruction from a friend and shop owner and the Wright pamphlet and later Jobst's book (which I bought at Cupertino Bike Shop immediately after its release), practically all my cohorts built wheels -- and we all hung out at the same shop owned by Mr. Wheel Guru, who ran twice-weekly shop rides (races) -- and half of them worked for brand-new Specialized Bicycle Components and lived and breathed bike stuff. I knew Phil Wood (his son was a friend), so that's the direction I went after probably '75/6, although I had some racing wheels with Campy hubs Anyway, wheel building was a thing back then -- as it was on this NG during Jobst's tenure. Now is wheels in a box. Things change.

And I'll bet that "wheels in a box" came about largely due to the
development of automated wheel building machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EITEQLn8SUE

Thank God for engineers!


Peter White of Peter White cycles is still building wheels and I'm sure our
Mr. Muzi gets to go home and lace a rim or three while watching TV once in
awhile (that's why my bike shop owning friend said he used to do).

Now I feel like taking a spare front wheel down, taking it apart and
building it, just for fun.

pH

I haven't built a wheel outside the shop since the day I
started working here. And I don't own a television.

I own a bunch of TVs. And as a matter of fact, going back to the obsolescence thing, the TV in my bedroom -- an older Vizio LCD -- died the other day, so we went to Costco and bought a cheap replacement, and then I felt guilty about dumping a 42" LCD TV, so I opened the back and found a burned-out resistor on the power board, like a half-watt .15 ohm (brown, green, silver, gold), which is not an easy resistor to find on the interweb. A burned out resistor could also mean up stream problems, so I just bought a NOS power board for $39. I popped that in, and it works like a charm.

I went that route with our previous flat screen TV, first replacing some
bulged capacitors, then paying Ebay for a used power supply. Then paying
$20 to our county's recycling program to dispose of it responsibly.

And that's the problem with ever-more-computerized appliances. Some evil
voodoo practitioner stabs a needle into a model of your device and the
curse can never be diagnosed, let alone cured. It's why I'll never have
electronic shifting.

Our most-used music playing device (radio, CD, cassette tape) is now
wonky. CDs play each track over and over because the "Repeat" function
won't turn off. Hitting "Volume Up" changes the radio station, etc. But
a repair shop charges $80 to get it in the door and look at it, with no
guarantee of fixing it. :-(

--
- Frank Krygowski