Wheel and component specialists DT Swiss have just debuted a new online spoke calculation tool for anyone interested in lacing up their own wheels, from amateurs to pros. We’ve had experience with a number of different tools over the years from classic excel spreadsheets to rudimentary online tools, and this one is much nicer to use than anything in recent memory. What really makes it stand out from tools we’ve used in the past is how nicely it plays with different platforms. So far we’ve tried it out on the laptop, a tablet, and an iPhone and it has been simple and easy on each device. Hop past the break for an overview shot of the interfaces and a link to try it out…
Of course since it was developed in-house, the new DT Swiss Spoke Calculator web app favors their rims and hubs with all the pertinent data for their entire range available at a drop down menu, but it does also allow entry of dimension data for any other component as well. On the other hand, as DT does make a number of solid hub options for everything from lightweight road builds to burly mountain wheels, a lot of those hub and rim offerings will certainly get some use too.
The tool looks to do well at allowing flexibility, while at the same time preventing setups incompatible with their hubs and rims. (You get pretty much full freedom venturing into the User Defined side of things, thankfully.) The web app lets you create an account to login and save your wheel build calcs or proceed anonymously, where you can still print or email the results.
There’s nothing revolutionary here (and we’ll still be doing data entry for most of our builds), but a nice bit of user interface and mobile compatibility go a long way these days. So now, no matter what device is closest at hand when we dream of building a new set of tubulars for cross racing, this web-based tool will help get us sorted.
