Brett Cue is back with another MotoSport How To segment. Check it out as we walk you through these easy steps for wheel lacing, truing and what to look for once you have them together. Everything you need in this video is readily available on our website.

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Hey guys. This is Bret Cue from MotoSport.com here, and I'm going to show you how to lace and true some wheels for your dirt bike. A lot of people think this is too tough for them to do themselves. But if you follow along with the right steps we have, and the right tools, it's really a pretty easy process.

Tools you're going to need for this job:

  • Anti-seize for your spokes
  • Spokes
  • Correct size spoke wrench
  • Spoke nipples
  • Rim
  • Hub
  • BikeMaster truing stand

There's a few things you want to check for before you even get started. A lot of times, you'll have spokes that are different lengths. On the front, they're normally the same. You can hold them like this, check them. These are the same length. On the rear, oftentimes, you'll have two different lengths of spokes. These are rear spokes where you can see the lengths are different.

One thing a lot of people don't know, and sometimes it's not a big deal, but there are times where it will be - Your serial number right here, you're going to want to put that on the side of your break disk. So we're going to put this down, serial number down, break disk side here, down. And it's going to be that way on the front and the back wheel.

Now that we have our hub right in the center of the rim, we have it the way we want it. We're going to get a couple of spokes which we've already coated up with the ant-seize. And we're going to start with the inner spokes. The inner spokes towards the middle here. We're going to put all these in before we put the outer spokes in. Now we have all our inner spokes in place for this side.

Now we're going to work on the outer spokes. As you can see, I started putting on the spokes closest to me, but you can start anywhere around the wheel you want. You want to make sure you do the inside spokes right here, on the bottom, first. And then, you overlay the outside spokes on the top.

The next thing you want to do is line up each spoke with the corresponding hole. The holes will all match the angle of the spoke. Start this one. When I'm doing this, I'm barely installing the spoke nipples for right now just to get it in place.

Now that we have this side complete, we're going to turn it over and work on the other side. Do the exact same thing. We're going to start with the inside spokes, then work on the outside. On this side we do the same thing. We just make sure that the spokes line up with the holes in the rims. Then you just repeat the same thing you did on the other side. Each model will vary, but in this case, every inner spoke is four spokes apart. Every outer spoke is four spokes apart. Now we got our wheel laced up. Now the fun part comes where we get to true it.

Now that we got the wheel on the truing stand, you just want to make sure you go through all the spokes and get them hand tight. Now that we have all the spokes snugged up, we want to check the side to side and up and down movement of the rim by having it on the truing stand here.

The first thing you want to worry about is the up and down movement. The way you do it, is you get this bar here, put it right at the bottom of the rim, and then you check and see if there's any spots that hit the bar. And if there is, you loosen the top, tighten the bottom just to bring the rim closer to the hub.

After that you can concentrate on your lateral movement. The way you do it is the same was as you do the top and bottom. Take this bar, put it up just a little bit higher to the side of the rim. Tighten it up. Give it a spin just to see where you're off at.

If there's any spots where your rim hits the bar, you're going to want to loosen the spokes connected to this side and tighten the ones connected to this side. That way it'll pull your rim over and away from the bar. You can start on any spoke, but it's best to start on one with a reference point.

I'm going to use the valve stem here. You want to tighten the first spoke. You want to tighten them all evenly. Tighten the first spoke to here. Then skip two and tighten every third spoke all the way around the wheel. Tighten it the exact same each time. Once you do three rotations, each spoke will have gotten tightened once.

It doesn't hurt to have to go around more than three times. You go three times, and then start over again and do three more times. You just want to make sure everything's even. Now that we're around here back to the valve stem, we ended up on the same one, so we're going to go one back and go again. Now for the third rotation around the wheel. After we get done with this time around, we'll have all the spokes tightened up one time. And then you might have to go around a few times, like I said, to get them where you want to be.

Once you're done with the first rotation, it's a good time to put the gauge back down there and make sure that things are still good because it's easy to fix now, easier than whenever you get all the spokes tight. We're going to spin it. Make sure everything's still good. It all looks really good still. We're going to keep on tightening. Go around again. The reason for tightening every third spoke is because it equally distributes the load around the entire wheel.

We're going to go through these spokes again, tighten them the same way, every third spoke, just making minor adjustments if needed. If not, you don't want to torque down one spoke too much at a time. You just want to make sure you do it evenly.

We finished lacing up our front wheel, and we've done our back wheel the exact same way. We've gone through the same process. Oftentimes you will have different lengths of spokes on your back wheel, and you'll want to refer to your owner's manual on that.

We got our front wheel laced up, trued. Back wheel laced up and trued. There's just a few things you want to remember whenever you're doing this:

  • Put your anti-seize on spokes or you'll regret it.
  • Make sure to tighten the spokes evenly - every three spokes, three rounds around the wheel.
  • Whenever you ride for the first 15 or 20 minutes of the first day you go out come back in to check your spokes because they will get loose whenever they seed into the rim. Check every three spokes, three rounds around the wheel.