I was looking at various commercially available lacing jigs, but was not convinced about the justification of the costs. I showed a friend of mine one of them (specifically Noble's lacing jig. They appear to have shut their doors, so they aren't commercially available anymore). This friend thought he'd be able to sort of reverse engineer it and 3d print a bunch of the parts, and that'd we'd be able to source lots of other parts from stuff laying around the bike shop or easily obtain them from the hardware store. He figured we'd be able to do it for "under $100" pretty easily (this of course required access to a 3d printer, which he has).
He originally had designed a super slick hot-swappable adaptor mechanism to switch between QR, 12mm, and 15mm TA hubs. It was going to be a sort of twist lock thing (like a garmin mount) that was spring loaded and you'd twist it up and down to lock it into place. We went down this path for fear that a simple sleeved step-up piece would fall off too easily if taking a wheel on and off the jig. At the end, the cool twist lock thing would actually just spin in its entirety inside the aluminum pipe that made up the uprights. We chopped the twist lock portion off, and wound up with much simpler adaptors that are on pretty securely & require some force to remove.
The uprights are made from some schedule 40 aluminum pipe I picked up from the hardware store behind the bike shop, that's probably the most variable portion of this in terms of price - your ability to get a good price on that will take this thing from being about $50 as our original bill of materials states (that wasn't factoring in price of those) up to about $100 if you can't get a great deal on the tubing - you could presumably if you were much cleverer than I, scale the 3d printed parts to fit different stock of tube you might already have access to. I think I eventually wound up spending about $85 or so on this.
I wanted to coat the "rim rollers" in plasti-dip because I was fearful of the hard 3d printed material being too loud when in use, and potentially scraping/scratching any rims. It turns out that once I plasti-dipped them, the horizontal surface of them had too much friction and they wouldn't spin with a rim anymore. I attached some felt to the horizontal portion, which allows the rim to slide across the flat portion. The rubberized vertical portion allows the rim to force the roller to spin when I grab the rim and rotate it to move it into position.
I've built three wheels with it now, and it seemed like it has the potential to be faster than my previous method (everything sitting on my lap, as most of you here probably build). It felt a little foreign, and it'll take some time to get used to, I'm sure.
The uprights are moveable. They thread into a little spring loaded part that slides along a track inside the extrusion. The entire thing can be broken down with only a 4mm hex key to remove the base from the extrusions. The uprights are all removable tool free from the base/extrusions.
In future revisions, I think we will likely increase the infill percentage on some of the portions that were 3d printed, to increase their strength and rigidity. I still may try and track down a machinist overseas or locally to make the central portion out of aluminum. We believe a local makerspace may have the machinery to make the central portion out of aluminum available from somewhere like McMaster-Carr for not very much money. I also have seen various overseas (read: china) rapid prototyping places that seem like they'd be able to do it for also not very much money.
Reasons you should buy the noble version if they come back: it was a little more polished, had metal in lots of places where I've got 3d printed plastic. Their horizontal parts also have markings to indicate specific positions for varied wheel sizes. Even having not seen one in person, I can unequivocally state that the noble jig would be a higher quality device, with a much more finished look.
I also today picked up a huge pelican case (a used 1620 for $80) that this will fit into, along with a host of other parts and tools.
He wrote in much much greater detail about technical aspects & printing of parts on thingiverse, where he has
uploaded his design.
Here's a link to a reddit post, with an album with more photos.
