Today I picked up my parts from the powder coater. They called yesterday and told me they had some issues in the out-gassing process. Several of the parts developed “pimples” as she called it. Basically there was something contaminated in the aluminum that kept coming to surface. They had to redo several parts 3 times to get a quality finish. It was mostly the brake plate that gave then problems. Overall they look good. There are one or two spots that aren’t great, but I could have also spent a little more time on my prep and smoothing out some areas. You won’t notice those spots unless you are right up on them though. The down side is they charged an extra $50 because the extra labor. Total bill was $250 for 8 pieces in gloss black. 2x rims, 2x hubs, 1x brake plate, 1x dual disc hub cover & 2 extra exhaust hangers I fabbed up for my Cone mufflers.
I started off by taping up the rim area with painters tape to help prevent any scratches while installing the spokes. Then I pulled out my spoke set to get everything layed out. There are two different spoke styles for each wheel. They are identical except for the head on the end. The inner spokes have a little less bend and just a touch shorter than the outer spokes. Here you can see the inner spoke on the right and outer spoke on the left for comparison.
HERE is a great tutorial that I followed on this from another website.
I started on the front wheel first. Begin with Installing the inner spokes for both sides. These mount from the outside hub flange. Lay the hub flat and do one side at a time. Push the spokes into the hub top side and lay them in a counter clockwise direction. The spokes on the bottom side should lay in a clockwise direction. Once you have all the inner spokes in the hub, lay you rim down over the spokes. Follow the pattern in the tutorial I posted above and screw on the nipples loosely to cover just a few threads.
Once you have those on, you can install the outer spokes. I found it easiest to feed them down into the holes on the bottom hub flange and leave them all standing up. Once they are all in, pick the whole wheel up and let them fall into place and flip the wheel over. Lay them in the counter clockwise direction again and find the corresponding hole and loosely install the nipples again. Now repeat the process for the last 9 spokes on the bottom flange and you have yourself a loosely spokes wheel.
The process for the rear wheel is the same, but I found it much easier than the front.
Tomorrow, I will dress the spoke threads with anti-seize and start to tighten them up a little. Fortunately they supply you with 40 spokes in each kit. One of my spokes was broken and I never noticed until I went to thread the nipple on that it had no threads.