Tied and soldered spokes were once a final touch from the finest mechanics upon the highest quality wheels, but have for the most part faded into obscurity. Seen only rarely these days, many cyclists have never personally laid eyes upon a set of tied and soldered wheels, let alone question the history of the practice or learn to tie their own.
I had such a wheel built back when I was doing a lot of hard riding on city streets. The idea was maximum durability and high-torque acceleration in traffic.
The wheel was built with a 27″ Weinmann concave rim and a high-flange Campagnolo Nuovo Record hub, laced 3-cross. It went on a very tight 21.5″ frame made to spec of Reynolds 531, with a straight-gauge downtube.
It performed as expected, handling atrociously rough roads and giving excellent high-torque acceleration, despite the added rotating mass, probably thanks to reduced wind-up.
Lateral rigidity was also improved, making that bike’s handling the most precise and predictable I’ve ever ridden.
However, the spoked wheel has a shock-absorbing function, which is reduced with the effective length of the spokes. This may be why the frame cracked clean through above the front derailleur mount with only about 10,000 miles on it. RIP Black Betsy.
Jobst Brandt calls bulls*$t on tied and soldered spokes:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/tied-soldered.html
Nevertheless, it’s a nice touch and certainly something you don’t see anymore. The tutorial in Urban Velo #11 was great! Whether or not it offers any improvement is up in the air, but damn, it looks cool.
Why on earth would anybody do such a bench test and not ride the wheels?
Because it is Jobst Brandt…the Chuck Norris of veloculture. Don’t you read Bike Snob NYC?!?
Norris - Rambo! - Terminator! That’s the kind of Mad Max moxie it’d take to really test these wheels. I’m not surprised 35 pounds of force had no effect on them.
A bench test is a good idea, but the object would be finding out how much force it takes to deform the wheel, and how it compares to a standard-built wheel. I guess what we need here is the Terminator of velo culture - if we be fearless - or maybe just a Calibrator with a little more oomph.
Short of that, there’s just chaotic and subjective real world experience, but I see these were still being used in the 2006 Paris-Roubaix race, from cyclingnews.com.
I only checked out Bike Snob once - sharp, but my interests are more ex-urban these days, out here in the Mojave. This site is my usual contact with urban riding, so I’m not completely out of touch when I have to hit fer the settlements myself.
Thirty-five pounds might not be representative of real-world forces being applied to a wheel, but it’s still significant that there was no measurable difference in the loaded response of the plain wheel and the tied-and-soldered one.
Strain (or deformation) is a function of the stress (or applied load). That the deformations were the same for both wheels indicates that the ties and soldering aren’t altering the structural characteristics of the wheel…at least under the loading conditions of the test.
The only way the tie/solder will have any effect on the wheel is by increasing torsional rigidity (reducing wind-up), it will not affect lateral or radial rigidity enough to be even remotely perceivable - a simple and quick analysis of the way the spoke carries the stresses points this out. I’m sure wind-up is perceivable but does it affect performance seeing as it is effectively an elastic deformation storing energy and then giving it back?