My wheel

After riding the London to Brighton ride last week my already slightly wobbly rear wheel was looking decidedly out of true. Truing a wheel is in my opinion the trickiest maintenance task you can do with a bike. Every one of the 36 spokes needs it tension minutely adjusted until the wheel is straight and round to millimetre accuracy. It took me a while. I don't have a truing stand, so I used the brakes and a piece of card taped to the frame to as a guide. The procedure is pretty simple:

• Rotate the wheel to a point where it's to far to the left or right, or a too far in or out.
• Find the mid point of the imperfection and mark it with a small piece of electrical tape attached to the nearest spoke.
• Adjust the tension of the surrounding spokes on either or both sides of the wheel.
• Repeat....

So that's what I did for most of sunday morning Rotate, Mark, Adjust, Rotate, Mark, Adjust. It could have been a frustrating tedious task, but it turned out to be surprisingly rewarding. The simple repetition, the intense focus on tiny adjustments, the slowly improving shape of my rear wheel, and little background music on the CD player just absorbed me. It would be nice if I could make every job feel like that.