The Art of Wheelbuilding by Gerd Schraner (1999, Paperback, Spiral)

This book was written by Gerd Schraner. He is a successful, master wheelbuilder, with 45 years experience in building bicycle wheels in Europe. The book is a summary of that experience. The focus of the book is the classic, spoked bicycle wheel for road cycles. The book is 103 pages, and covers general wheel information, component selection, and detailed wheel building procedures. The strength of the book is that it gives practical, applied information about building bicycle wheels. Much of this information can only be gained by years of experience. As a result, a less experienced person can greatly benefit by Mr. Schraner's experience. I have been building wheels for 29 years, and definitely learned fron this book. The weak area of the book involves the comments in the book that are more theoretical in content. Some of these comments are not well founded. The author is a technician, not an engineer. The theoretical aspects of the bicycle wheel are covered better in The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt. In summary, this is a good book with a great deal of valuable information for any wheelbuilder. The best situation is to read both this book and The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt. This combination covers both practical and theoretical information about bicycle wheels. Supplement these two books with the excellent internet presentation on wheel building by the late Sheldon Brown, and bicycle wheels can be successfully built by interested cyclists.