Racing - Throwing Your Bike (Pictures)

I wrote a post a while back about throwing your bike, meaning doing a bike throw at the finish of a sprint. I know that I'm somewhat obsessive about bike throws, even doing bike throws when I'm well clear of the field.

However, my livelihood doesn't depend on it. I still do them, just because I want to do the best I can with what I have. I do bike throws because I don't want to leave something to chance.

My bike throw from April 12, 2015.

It's a very minor one, I thought I was clear so I threw the bike out of habit.

I'm not way over the back wheel.

This is a pretty poor bike throw, I've gained maybe 6-12 inches forward travel on the bike. My head would normally be over the bars, or even in front of them in an all out sprint, not behind them. If I had to really reach I could have gotten another 6 inches of reach I think.

The picture below shows just how safe I was playing that finish.

That's me up ahead, the speck below the red and white tent awnings.

Like I said, I threw the bike just to be safe.

And today, July 5th, 2016, in the Tour, I think that Direct Energie's Coquard had the sprint in the bag. He simply could not finish it off with a good bike throw.

Bryan Coquard's finish in Stage 4 of the 2016 Tour de France.

Picture from BH Bikes USA, Facebook.

The significant thing here is that Coquard is sitting on his saddle.

This means he did not do a bike throw at the finish.

Remember that you're classified as finishing when your bike breaks the plane of the finish line. I think if the bike is crashing then it's not necessarily the front tire, but in a normal sprint you're looking to put the front tire to the line before anyone else. That's key because it means that you're not as concerned about your head, your torso, etc. It's the front tire of the bike.

The way a bike throw works is the rider moves momentum/inertia from one part of the bike/rider unit to another. Since the rider, even a skinny Tour racer, is heavier than their bike, a racer can shove themselves backward on the bike to move the bike forward. If you shove the bike forward relative to your body you will momentarily slow your body. In return your bike will accelerate.

Say you weigh 160 lbs. Your bike weighs 16 lbs. If you move your body back one inch, your bike will move forward 10 inches. This means that if you move your bike forward, relative to your body, just an inch or two, you'll gain half a wheel in the sprint.

Okay, that's not totally accurate. There's wind resistance, there's friction, and there's the fact that part of your body is moving with the bike (your hands, feet, some of your arms, most of your legs). Plus there's the whole "how long are your arms" question - if you can't reach further forward then your bike isn't going forward any more.

The reality is that if you move your hips back about 8-10 inches you'll realistically get your bike forward maybe 12-18 inches. It's not ten to one ration between yours and your bike's movement, it's more like three to two. Still, though a foot is significant if you're losing the sprint by a an inch.

The wrong way to do a bike throw is to simply straighten your arms. You don't move your body relative to the bike so the bike doesn't leap forward. This is what Coquard did at the end of Stage 4.

The right way to do a bike throw is to extend your arms as you drop your pelvis behind your saddle. By pushing your pelvis behind your saddle you're moving the most mass possible as far back as possible.

This thrusts the bike forward.

This is the bike throw that basically started the blog.

Once I realized I could sprint on the bike I started looking at how to optimize my sprint. I learned about bike throws, figured out the physics thing (thanks to school), and from then on I was doing bike throws all the time. Easy ride? Throw my bike to whatever shadow was in front of me. Waiting in the parking lot for a group ride? Bike throws to empty parking spot lines. Group ride? Bike throw at town line sprint.

Races?

Bike throws for sure.

Over the course of 30-odd seasons I don't think it'd be unrealistic to say that I've done maybe 10,000 bike throws. If I did 300 a year that would be about 10,000. I probably had single days where I did 50 or 75 or even 100 bike throws. I even had bike throw mishaps, like when I went out on a ride on my Aerolite equipped bike with slippers on instead of cycling shoes.

For a long time I never thought I'd really use a bike throw because I seemed to get shelled all the time. Eventually though I started sprinting, started placing, and started doing bike throws for real.

I did get an interesting place in the Tour of Michigan due to a bike throw. We were sprinting curb to curb, about 10 riders across. I was stuck in the second row. The first row was somehow, magically, sprinting at basically the exact same speed, within a foot or two of one another.

The second row was soft pedaling, waiting for someone to blow, waiting for that gap to open to allow them to surge past that blowing up front row and win the race.

The gap never happened.

At the line I thrust my bike forward as far as I could. My front wheel ended up at or past some of the front row riders' pedals and cranks. I thought I might lose my wheel to those spokes.

There were 10 riders in the first row of sprinters. I got 11th in the race.

Fast forward about 11-13 years. I was one point behind Morgan in the overall in the Bethel Spring Series. I had to beat him in the sprint, and get top 7, to win the Series overall. As a sprinter I was definitely one step behind Morgan. He could beat me straight up; I was close only because he skipped a race, I think because it was raining and he'd used himself up in the Masters race.

Coming into the sprint I followed Bethel Cycle's four man leadout train. They had two sprinters, Stephen G and Bryan H. Both of them would win the Series overall in other years - they are both very good riders. I sat on their wheels, waiting for the right moment to pounce.

I jumped very late, trusting in my jump to give me the best chance against Morgan. We sprinted at similar speeds (he a bit faster) but in the jump I possibly had an edge.

I sprinted towards the finish. I'd jumped hard I thought I had it made. I was debating if I should raise my hands or not. Then, just before the line, to my right, I sensed something.

I looked.

To my horror it was Morgan. He'd gotten boxed in going into the sprint (when one or both of the Bethel sprinters blew up), had to back out of that spot, and was now closing with a fury. He was sprinting noticeably faster than me. I had to get to the line before he passed me for good.

I did a couple more pedal strokes and desperately threw my bike at the line. I threw the bike so hard I lost my grip on one side of the bar, causing me to veer crazily toward the left curb.

But, in all that, I'd done a good bike throw. I'd won the race, and with it, the Series.

You can see here that I'm only slightly ahead of Morgan.

I'm rapidly slowing in the sprint at this point. It's hard to see in the pictures but in the video you can see that I'm not going as fast as Morgan.

However I'm already getting into the bike throw at this point.

As my body extends back my bike moves forward.

I'm trading my body's position to gain bike movement.

At this point I'm going to win the race. I'm deep into my bike throw, I'm still not fully extended, but my front wheel is already ahead of Morgan's wheel.

I'm still extending, trying to get my hips down.

At this point I'm still getting further back on the bike. My head is coming down really hard, hard enough to hit my helmet to my stem. I can feel the saddle in my stomach and I'm hoping that I don't fall back into my own rear wheel.

The finish.

I'm fully extended and on the edge of losing control. The saddle is firmly in my stomach and I have marginal control over the bike.

However, if you look at Morgan, you can see he's really only raised himself up out of the saddle. If he'd thrown the bike forward it would have been a closer race. I always compare head position relative to the line - my head is forward of Morgan's so I think I'd still have won. However it would have been much, much closer.

His hips are basically in the same place as mine, and if he had a similar torso length as me, I think his head would have been about even with mine. It would have been even a closer race.

Bike throws are quick. In pictures they look nice and neat, but in reality it's a little spurt and that's that.

The bike throw for the 2005 Bethel Spring Series (go to just before 6 minutes into the clip for real time, 7 minutes in for slow motion):

Coquard, in the sprint for Stage 4 today in the Tour, didn't move his bike forward relative to his body. If he had done so he realistically would have taken the stage.

The last kilometer, courtesy the Tour (no commentary):

 I did notice that virtually no one threw their bikes at the line, even Kittel. It might have been that the uphill drag was particularly tough. However that's even more the reason to throw the bike, because if only one rider throws his bike...

For all us normal racers the bike throw is an easy skill to practice, you can do it all ride long on easy rides, you can do it warming up for races or group rides, you can even do bike throws when you're testing riding your bike (or someone else's bike). It's a skill that you should master and use. You never know when it'll come in handy.

Tactics - Strava Playback

So the other day on bike forums someone mentioned that Strava lets you playback rides and such. I saw something about this but it didn't seem relevant to me. Meaning I almost never ride with anyone else and the majority of my training rides are indoors on a trainer, so Strava is more a public training diary than anything else.

Then someone said that he "watched" the playback of a race and saw someone stop for a lap and then jump back in, saying it was sort of funny to see it right there in "real life" if you will.

This made the "playback" feature seem a bit more interesting to me because I'm always curious about analyzing race tactics after the fact. Rehashing a race fascinates me because I have some solid data, like my power and heart rate numbers, my "perceived effort" memories, and a better understanding of what was happening around me.

I went to look for the "playback" feature on my Strava pages but couldn't find anything. Google rescued me - it's not really a "feature" yet, it's sort of in testing.

So this is how you do it.

First you need to go the Strava Laboratory.

The Strava Labs screen.

From there click on Activity Playback. This brings you to the Flyby Page.

The Flyby page, with a box up at the top right for putting in a URL.

Based on the name and the notes it seems that Strava put this in place so that if someone rides by you ("fly by") you can look for your activity and any Strava riders near you. I suppose that you could use this to learn about and follow a local rider, see if the rider that blew by you turned off and stopped, stuff like that.

For me, though, since no one rides past me while I'm on the trainer, my interest sits in recreating a race.

To look up an activity you need to go to one of your activities and copy the URL.

For my sake I'm going to use the last Bethel, the Zwiedzanie Bethel. The URL for my activity is
http://app.strava.com/activities/129982402

Copy/paste the URL/address from your actual activity.

I copy/paste that into the activity field in the Flyby Page.

My activity copy pasted into the Flyby box.

This brings up my activity plus a list of riders that were at the same location that day. Each name has three columns. The first is the green "C", for correlation. The higher this number the more likely the rider actually rode with you. For a race if the C is too low then the rider probably did a different category race. As a rule I find that anything over 50% is pretty good, it means they usually rode with me.

The second column is the purple "S", for spatial. This means the rider rode the same roads as you did. Obviously if they did a crit on the same course then the S will be high. I ignore this for race reviews since everyone does the same course, at least the ones I race.

The third column is the red "D", for distance. This just tells you how far the particular person rode. This is a sanity check since some riders will do a couple races or warm up for an hour or get shelled in a few minutes. I tend to ignore this also, but I think it would make sense if you were, say, checking to make sure riders completed a required loop (like in a road race, time trial, or gran fondo). It would help catch out those that sit out a few laps or do a shortcut.

Finally you can hover over each name to get the title of their ride. For the Bethel race I did the Cat 3-4 race so anything with some reference to that gets picked. Those that say M45 or P123 etc get skipped.

For me, then, I check off all the riders whose C value is over 50%, seeing if their activity title matches the Cat 3-4 race. A lot of people put non descriptive titles so it's hard to tell (like "Bethel race"). Obviously I recognize a few names so I make sure to get them checked off.

Then I hit play and see if it makes sense.

Each rider shows up with their avatar/picture in a circle. If you selected one that wasn't racing (or whatever) you can hover over the circle, get their name, and uncheck them from the list.

So during the race you can see things develop.

It also plays in fast forward so it's not an agonizingly slow thing. In fact you need to use the arrow buttons next to the play button to advance a frame at a time, else it's virtually impossible to watch detailed bits of playback.

Tip: the elapsed time seems to adjust automatically so you can sort of ignore it. For example I turn on Strava on my phone pretty early so that it's on when I go to the line. After I turned on Strava I took some podium pictures and such so there's a lot of time where I'm not moving at all, hence the weird time at the start of the race.

Start of the race.

If you do the same event as my example you'll see everyone lined up and waiting as I take some podium pictures. I hustle to the line and we start immediately.

The break develops.

In this particular race a massive break of 14 riders went clear. Since not everyone has Strava it's not clear but it would be cool to see a fully-Strava-equiped field in replay mode.

Field sprint at end of race.

In the field sprint we come close to catching those off the back of the break. I'm leading the charge up the hill and there are some break guys that are already at their cars. Others are blowing up at the line and barely moving.

So that's my short tutorial on Strava Flyby, the playback feature available on Strava.

Helmet Cam - How I Produce Clips

Recently I uploaded my first new clip since March of this year. Last year I only managed to release a few. As part of my explanation on why I've been so sparse on clip uploads I wanted to share how I produce a clip. They obviously represent a lot of work, a lot of time, and I'm proud of the clips I produce. Okay, I'm proud of the HD clips. I watch the earlier non-HD ones and it's a bit embarrassing sometimes but I learned from them. In an ideal world with unlimited time I'd redo them while revealing some unsaid tactical motivations/goals.

So, for those of you interested, my "clip editing process" goes something like this:

1. Copy raw footage off of ContourHD. This is when I know if I got the data or if I forgot to charge the battery or clear the memory. Although the Contour beeps loudly when it runs out of juice or memory I sometimes don't hear it in the heat of the action.

I missed at least three really good races because I forgot to clear the memory before the race. One was the Mystic Velo Crit in 2010. The camera's memory lasted 15 minutes. I got second in the race. Another was one of the first Bethels in 2010. In a terrible rainy day I managed third in the sprint, and I raced with virtually unusable brakes. The last was the 2010 New London Crit. A new course, lots of turns, and a good finish after the guy in front of me fell over in the last turn.

I now have a spare ContourHD so I hope to eliminate problems like "I forgot to charge it" or "I forgot to clear its memory" or "I forgot the camera at home" kind of things.

2. If the clip is good enough to work with I import it into iMovie. This is a few hour process so I start it and let it run, usually overnight. My first computer was virtually useless while running this in the background. Now, with 16GB of RAM and a quad core processor, I can do basic browsing really slowly or work on writing.

This step put a huge dent in my video clip production. At some point in 2012 I realized that the raw footage I wanted import weren't showing up in iMovie. After a lot of research, after trying all sorts of stuff (using different cars, renaming files, etc), I finally resorted to using the old MacBook, the one that is sort of obsolete.

I could upload the clips right away. This started a spasm of video production - I've finished two, almost finished a third, and I have a few more to work on.

3. My priorities in picking which clip to do breaks down to three things. The first is whether or not it's fun. For me fun is when I can substantially influence, in a good way, the outcome of a race. That means I do a good sprint, I help a teammate, stuff like that. In 2012 I was very unfit so I almost never had the legs to help a teammate so I tended to choose the races where I had a decent finish. To give an example of the opposite of fun - there's a race where I attacked at the gun. No one went with me, I pushed on when I should have sat up, and I soloed for about 3 laps. I got caught and dropped in about 30 seconds. Would this make an exciting clip? No. Maybe to laugh at me but there's nothing productive I can find in that race.

The next thing is if there's a new course. Although I like Bethel I don't want to have 80 clips of Bethel and 15 of other courses, split evenly between TuesdayTheRent and New Britain. Seriously though I don't get to do new courses too often so if I can get to a virgin helmet cam course then all the better.

The last factor is a lesson one. In some races the racers are so good at tactics and bike handling that I feel like a novice in them. In other races... well it's sort of the opposite. Watching errors on tape makes it much more real and allows analysis so that the racer can work on fixing their errors. This is what happens in football but in amateur cycling it's quite rare.

4. Skim whole clip in iMovie, a stock application that comes with Macs. I like iMovie because you can see thumbnails of the whole clip in very small increments, and if you drag the cursor around the video plays at that speed. Sliding the cursor forward means you get a good fast forward. It makes it easier to find things on the clip.

I try to remember significant tactical moves and include them in the clip. Sometimes I'm at the back when a break goes (okay, I'm almost always at the back) and so the clip can't illustrate the break going away. If the move isn't visible I usually skip it but I may allude to it in the clip's text.

5. I also see if I can find any memorable but independent incidents that I remember. These include crashes, weird moves, elemental errors, and close (but safe) situations. They may not affect the tactics but they're interesting. They include things like a bottle pass between two teammates while a third rider, not on the same team, drops his own bottle. Another race, the last non-HD one, featured a newspaper stuck in a rider's derailleur that I ended up removing.

Many of these interesting sections are 30-45 seconds, and some of them are as short at 8-12 seconds. I don't go shorter than 8 seconds since it's hard to comprehend what's happening in 4 or 5 seconds. Most of my text boxes are 4 seconds long so to have an "intro text" and a "conclusion text" takes, at best, 8 or 9 seconds.

6. I get the last lap in its entirety. Since I usually contest the sprints that's the most interesting part of the race. If applicable I get the prior lap and even a lap before the final lap, but since laps take up minutes at a time, it's "expensive" time.

In the past I was limited to 10 minutes. I had to cut a second here and a second there just to make the 10 minute limit. Then YouTube "upgraded" me to 15 minutes. Before I could get a couple clips out they upgraded me to "unlimited". Remember my clip selection process - fun, course, and memorable moments. Most of a race doesn't have fun stuff, the course is the same, and there are few memorable moments. Therefore I don't upload a whole race.

With my new unlimited time I find myself cutting less. My clips seem to end up at about 10-18 minutes long before I cut them.

7. When it's close to a usable length then start adding music. The music drives the mood so that's important. Sometimes I have a song in mind so I put that in wherever I wanted to put it then I work around that.

The music tends to have a cadence-type beat, something faster than 70 or 80 beats per minute. Something closer to 100 bpm is better, otherwise the clip seems to drag. The exception is if I'm trying to relay a sense of fatigue or something like that. Then I'll select more mellow songs.

One important thing is that I listen to the songs when I'm not working on clips - the Missus will verify that, yes, we listen to those songs over and over when we're in the car. I listen to them when I'm on the trainer. It gives me an idea of the song's "phrasing". I don't know what it's called but some songs are sort of beginning songs that kick things off with a flourish, some are middle songs that build tension or have an offbeat first note (so it sounds like it's a continuation of a thought, not the start of one), some are quiet, and some are great ending songs. I use songs that my brothers played in their bands and I try to use songs that certain people wrote and/or sang because I've been in touch with them.

One singer, Derek, of Linus, URT, and Zen Men, is a local and I see him pretty much once a year at my brother's house. He refers to me as the one man fan club.

Luckily the music my brothers played was mainly fast beat stuff.

There are some songs that just aren't appropriate for a bike race. They tend to be more emotional or very slow. My brothers' bands played a lot of music, more than the 20 or so songs I've used, but unfortunately the music isn't right for a bike racing clip.

Since I'm publishing to YouTube I don't use other artists' music. I don't want to run into copyright violations and such. I've asked some local racer/musicians for original music but the cadence, the bpm, has been too low in everything I've checked out. Nothing personal, it's just the music is too slow.

8. After roughing out the music I start adding text. This emphasizes the mood, gives me a chance to educate riders, and I spend a lot of time here. I'll adjust text after adding music because the two don't quite match and I can't rewrite the music or change its timing. I like some of the disjointed phrases in my brother's music, like being "so far away, at least one hundred miles" when I'm not on a wheel or "spread out like satin" when the field fans out for a turn.

 - If applicable I fill in the non-music sections with music.

 - Once I have the thing roughed out I add the credits. This takes a while since I try to list everyone I mention in order of appearance (after teammates or significant players), I have to get all the songs, and I try to remember all the people I need to thank at the end.

9. With a rough clip in hand I start the hard work - the polishing and honing. I probably refine a dozen times or more. This includes the time intensive step of reviewing the whole clip, at normal speed. It's here that I often catch the real errors. Nonetheless virtually every clip went out with an error, either mismatched text (I edited out a few blocks but a prior or following block relied on the old text so that one block seems out of place), mismatched font (when iMovie buffers heavily it drops font selection), or outright errors (bad spelling or whatever).

Since most of my clips are 10 or so minutes long, reviewing them takes a few hours. At first I find so many errors that I can't get through a single viewing without editing stuff. I find it helps to restart the MacBook since iMovie buffers a lot of memory, slowing things down to a crawl. Now I find that things work most reliably if I restart the machine after every session of iMovie. Even during a "session I'll restart if iMovie takes up more than 2 GB of RAM I restart the machine. When I go to sleep, if I've been working on iMovie, I just restart the machine. This way I know there will be plenty of memory for iMovie the next time I use it.

The slowness isn't the only issue - when iMovie buffers it won't save things, even things that I spent a lot of time doing. The problem is that I end up with random errors - in my standard two line text one line may have the default text in it, or the original font, or no outline, or something weird. Because I don't know what caused the error I have to assume that it could have happened anywhere in the clip. This means a long and thorough review of the clip.

10. Once I think it's done I export into a movie format. Then I watch the whole clip 2-6 times. I usually catch even more errors here and have to re-edit the "master", re-export, and then review.

The export takes about 2-3 hours on my machine so I usually leave this to cook while I go run errands or go to sleep. Once I export then I have a much smaller, much more manageable file, something in the 1 GB size range. I can watch this using Quicktime and I do, reviewing it at least two times, sometimes as many as 10 or 15 times.

All too often I catch errors. Many early errors, that ended up in the published clip, were due to iMovie buffering heavily. When iMovie is heavily buffered it fails to save edits and such. At least three times I've published a clip and found, to my horror, that the credits text had reverted to the default text. This happened in the yet-to-be-published 2012 M40+ New England Crit Championships and it's happened in earlier clips. At first I thought I just forgot to put the stuff in but later I realized that I had painstakingly put everything in and yet it was all gone.

The problem is that if the credits failed to save then I have no idea what other stuff didn't save. This means really checking things over, at least a few times. Since I'm watching a .mov file I can't edit things right there and then. I don't want to open iMovie and start editing because I get confused between the two and inevitably make a mistake after an hour or two. Therefore I make handwritten notes while watching the now-rejected .mov file, then open iMovie to make the changes.

11. I note errors in the exported file and fix them. I often export a clip into movie format at least three times, representing 6-9 hours of computing time just for the export. This doesn't include the approximately 1-3 hours of editing and checking for each export, so 3-9 hours of time where I'm working on the clip. Some clips take more exports and very few take less.

Since creating a new .mov file means editing in iMovie and exporting again, it means, at the very least, an hour to three hours of editing (edit errors, check whole iMovie draft to make sure no other random errors popped up), 3-6 hours of export to .mov, then maybe an hour of checking the new clip.

Finally, when I think the clip is good, I let it simmer. This means I don't look at it for a while, maybe a day. Then I check it again, with a fresh mind. Yes, I usually find some glaring error so I have to redo it.

12. I upload the file to YouTube. After final reviews of my simmered product I'll upload. With a wireless network I found it that the upload would get interrupted or get really slow, especially if the MacBook was far away from the router/modem. I'd move the MacBook close to the router and find that connecting it via a network cable works best.

The uploads usually take about 300-500 minutes. The problem is that I can't edit the YouTube information while it's uploading, at least not so I can tell. Therefore I want to be around when the upload finishes so I can put in the right title, the right description, stuff like that. I find that even when I am totally aware of when the upload finishes, by the time I've updated the title and description I see that there's already been a few views.

The main problem is that our internet throughput goes down the tubes when I'm uploading a clip. It's a huge task just checking email. Therefore I try to upload at night, timing the end of the upload so that it finishes when we wake up. Or, in the last upload, I uploaded during the day while watching Junior.

So that's what it takes to do a clip.

I can accelerate it a bit with a faster machine - with the new MacBook, before iMovie stopped importing my ContourHD files, I rarely had a editing/memory error, rarely had weird fonts, rarely had those memory related errors. The 64 bit operating system allowed me to install (and use) 16 GB of RAM. iMovie will quickly grow to 4-8 GB on that machine. The old MacBook, with a 32 bit operating system, is limited to under 4 GB of RAM, and when iMovie hits about 2.5 GB things start going south. For now, with the iMovie problems on the new MacBook, at least I know what I need to do to get a clip up.

Coming up at some point will be the 2012 White Plains Cat 3-4 crit and the 2012 New England Crit Champs M40+.

Helmet Cam - July 24, 2012 @TuesdayTheRent

July 24, 2012 I did one of many Tuesday Night races at The Rent. It seems both forever ago and like yesterday at the same time. I haven't been able to edit clips due to some iMovie problems. Well, I finally got my iMovie issues solved by using the old MacBook - apparently the newer OS, the newest updates, the prevent me from editing stuff in iMovie. Specifically the updated iMovie won't import any of my helmet cam clips. This is a problem because then I have nothing to edit. The outdated iMovie works fine.

Anyway, with a season of clips in the "import movie" queue I got crackin' on a couple clips. Here's the first one, from that July just half a year ago.

Enjoy.

How To - DV46 Spoke Lengths and Rebuild

The White Industries equipped 16H front and 20H rear Reynolds wheels uses spokes.

Of course.

I broke one of them a month or two ago, and with buying a house, moving, and even working, rebuilding the clincher rear has taken a bit of time. I finally got around to it, after overcoming a hurdle.

I found it a bit difficult to find exactly which size spokes the wheels use, and with the hidden spoke nipples, it was hard to see where they ended (and the broken spoke wasn't of much help). Reynold's site doesn't have specs for older wheels, especially those with hubs other than the ones currently used.

But they do have a support number.

So I called Reynolds, got a friendly and competent customer service person, and he looked up the spoke length for the White Industries equipped 16/20 spoke DV46 wheels.

The inner rim, where the spoke nipples sit, are the same for both the clincher and the tubular. The outer cap differentiates the two models. Since I have matching tubular and clincher DV46s, I decided that I better rebuild everything - the clinchers now, the tubulars after the clinchers.

Fine, I'll skip the front tubular I rebuilt two years ago, since that already has newer spokes. I used non-aero spokes, the better to make the wheel less flickery in sprints - for some reason I can't track a straight line when sprinting on aero-spoke equiped wheels. It must be me since no one else seems to have (or notice) this problem.

Anyway, for reference sake here are the spoke lengths:

Rear:
264 mm non drive
274 mm drive

Front:
266 mm front

I'll be re-using the original spoke nipples. I hadn't even taken one out to see what it looks like, but this last spoke popped way up top so the spoke nipple is rattling around in the rim.

The Reynolds spoke wrench (consumer version).

It is double ended, one longer than the other. I used the shorter end as the handle since it's easier to twirl. The wrench gives you tons of leverage so you don't need the long end except to free up old frozen nipples.

Here is the culprit. It broke on the threads. Brass nipple because it was a drive side spoke. Note the spokes are round for drive side, aero for non drive side. As mentioned before, I'll be using all round spokes, DT 14G Revolution spokes.

Preparing the new spokes.

Since it's a rear, I'm using two different color Spoke Prep, one for each side (they have different length spokes). In the Reynolds case the spokes are really different in length, but in normal wheel builds they differ by about 2 mm. This is hard to see right away and to avoid confusion and mis-laced wheels, it's better to play it save and use two colors. For front wheels you just use one color.

Nothing like some nice Spoke Prep. Dip and then rub it around.

Two different sides, ready to go. In my case I did Right Red (or beige). This makes Blue Left. The Blue side is visibly shorter, even in this not-too-close-up picture.

I started by removing one old spoke, then replacing it with one new one.

Spokes can be bent a bit. I'm doing this with an old spoke but I did it with new ones too. Don't bend too much, but relacing a wheel, one spoke at a time, will require some spoke "tweaks" to thread certain spokes through the mesh of spokes on the other side of the hub.

Respoking is a pain, especially since I didn't want to rotate the rim around at all. Since I didn't know how the rim reacts to different spoke angle stresses, I left the wheel intact (but loose) as I relaced the wheel.

Progress is when all the Red (beige) spokes are gone.

With hidden spoke nipples it's a real pain to thread the nipples onto the spoke. First you have to make sure the nipple gets on the spoke (I dropped two into the rim). Then you tighten it down. Since the spoke wrench for a hidden nipple rim is so far from the spoke, I can't feel the spoke twisting. Therefore I need to hold the spoke with my other hand to feel its twist.

Holding the spoke to feel it twist. Or, if removing a spoke, to hold it in place.

Turning the spoke nipple from the top. I couldn't take the two pictures at once because I don't have a third hand.

Wheel is laced but not tensioned. Note that all the spokes on the grey plastic bin top are the old black ones.

Favorite part of building a wheel (or relacing) - the spoke bend. I did it early on to make the relacing a bit easier, but at the end I did it properly using a screwdriver.

Wheel tensioned.

The wheel after its (my) record breaking run of 244 watts for 20 minutes. Note empty Gatorade bottles.

Its maiden run was on the Monday night group ride out of Granby Bikes. The wheel felt immediately responsive, stiff, rigid, just a joy to ride. Sure, you say, you've been riding other wheels, another bike, of course your "nice" bike will feel fine.

Fine, I admit that I've ridden the Giant on training rides, mainly with the Granby group. But I've been racing the Cannondale a couple times also, and I've ventured out a few times on it shod with race wheels, tubulars (no spares or anything). Although the tubulars are nice, they're not as, well, immediately responsive as the clinchers. I may have (a lot) more tension in the rear wheel but I'll have to check. Any differences or similarities should stand out when I rebuild the tubular DV46 with the same type of spokes.

Regardless they're nice wheels to ride now, and with a 20 spoke rear, instead of 19, it's a heck of a lot better.