Right Round Baby, Right Round ...

One of the most interesting things for me about building the bike has been how quite a few of my assumptions on how a bike works and what it's made up of have been challenged or shown to be complete nonsense. So it is with wheels.

For example, I'd always assumed that front and rear wheels were more or less identical.

Not so, as these photographs of my Mavic Aksium wheels show.

This is my rear wheel:

And this is my front wheel (the one on the right):

Spotted the difference? 

That's right - the spokes on one side of the rear wheel are "flat", so to speak - they stay within the plane of the rim. That's the side which the cassette (more on that later) attaches to. The amount by which the spokes come out of the plane of the rim is known as the "dish".

In all the years I've ridden bikes, and all the times I've taken back wheels off to mend punctures, I'd never noticed that, up until I saw those two wheels.