IT’S NOT AN ART. IT’S SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING.

Combining precision handbuilding with Holland Mechanics machine assistance, your wheels are built to the highest technical standards, with consistent, repeatable quality all the way down the line.

Each wheel that we produce goes through a painstaking and rigorous process of assembly, tensioning, truing, finishing, checking and documentation.

Initially, spokes are hand-laced to a hub while our Holland Mechanics lacing machine – uniquely programmed for every single hub, rim and lacing combination that we use – holds the rim.

From that point on, it takes about a minute before a wheel is produced: one that is tighter and truer than most machine-built wheels that you see on bicycles, and one that would give most wheelbuilders a run for their money. But that’s only the first step.

The wheel then goes onto a truing stand for hand-truing – with a difference. Our Holland Mechanics truing stand has a computer interface. An optical sensor tracks spoke position, so that we can identify every spoke as it comes up for tensioning. A mechanical sensor rolls against the rim surface, reading the roundness and side-to-side trueness of the rim to a precision level of one-fiftieth of a millimetre.

All this information is continuously displayed on the wheelbuilder’s monitor during final truing, removing the need for inaccurate, tedious guesswork and subjective eyeballing while vastly decreasing truing time.

Once the wheel has been hand-trued to within our exacting tolerances (one-quarter of a millimetre or less in any direction: some of our best rims even approach our mechanical sensor’s limits of resolution), and spoke tension is measured with our DT Swiss Digital Tensio, the spokes are manually stress-relieved for fatigue resistance and long life. Then it goes back in the truing stand for re-checking, before we log the final measurements of the wheel.

The last step is to assign each wheel, or pair of wheels, a unique and traceable serial number. We record and file the data for every Wheelcraft wheel.

Our combination of handbuilding and machine assistance speeds up the wheelbuilding process (saving you money) while delivering hand built precision and reliability.

The bonus is the level of consistency that would be impossible to achieve with human hands alone, giving you the assurance of a quality build every time.