Beginnings
GS Astuto was founded by Tim Smith to provide a fresh, ‘old-school’ approach to bicycle racing and business. Along with some super dedicated individuals (and family), GS Astuto’s mission is bring you the finest selection of Team oriented cycles and components. We are a Japanese registered company with offices in Japan. Our corporate ‘container’ for the GS Astuto brand is KK G.S. Astuto
Astuto, Our Retail Store and Experience Center is located in Matsuida, Gunma and provides not only our wheel sets, but also rental bikes and selected cycling gear we think are great additions (and necessities) for riders sharing the same spirit of adventure and competition.
Yeah, that's me finishing the Mt. Fuji 'Azami' Line Hillclimb on a 35yo Italian Team bike that I raced 35yrs ago. Same 42/52 x 14-21 'Alpine' gearing, same jersey, same shoes. Because sometimes it's good to remember.
Astuto, Our Retail Store and Experience Center is located in Matsuida, Gunma and provides not only our wheel sets, but also rental bikes and selected cycling gear we think are great additions (and necessities) for riders sharing the same spirit of adventure and competition.
Yeah, that's me finishing the Mt. Fuji 'Azami' Line Hillclimb on a 35yo Italian Team bike that I raced 35yrs ago. Same 42/52 x 14-21 'Alpine' gearing, same jersey, same shoes. Because sometimes it's good to remember.
Our Philosophy Astutoの哲学
I started GS Astuto about 30yrs ago with a couple of other young cycle racers. I was the ‘old man’ in the crew in my late 20′s and just off a stint of cyclotouring and racing in Europe. We were all Italiaphiles, if you’ve seen ‘Breaking Away’ , which was popular at the time, you’d pretty much have us nailed. Add in some basic punk-rock nature, pre-grunge socialism and the target narrows. But more than anything we loved to ride and race. And that’s what we did. A lot.
I had a repair garage business. I’m a good mechanic and worked on anything. From sports cars to bread trucks and everything in between. To me working on ‘things’ has always been a secondhand nature. Coming from a mixed farming, logging, aircraft and engineering mashup family history, being a mechanic and engineer was just in the DNA. Working on and building bikes was no different.
As a race team member, I was welcomed because of these skills. That , and I was a pretty good climber at about 129lbs and many summers working in the woods carrying 90lb steel ‘blocks’ up and down a mountain all day forges a bit of toughness and conditioning. When I wasn’t riding or racing, I was fixing and making. I picked up the skills easily. Not only did I understand the statics and dynamics of the machine from my engineering background and education, but I also had the hands to put it to the bench.
Of all wrenching I did, perhaps wheel building was the most enjoyable and intriguing. It involves a delicate layering process to take inherently weak components and construct something strong, reliable and durable. Every wheel becomes a legacy to me. A legacy of connecting the rider to the road in a unique way. No matter how many I build, I always find the process enlightening and learning. Tension creates structure. Structure creates object and the object carries us to new horizons.
GS Astuto went on hiatus after we ‘grew up’ a little and went our separate ways. After more than 20yrs, I returned to the bench. A new generation and new materials. Intrigued by the potential I started building again. And riding. They always go together for me. A wheel builder cannot exist without the other in my mind. Passion stems from Practice. Practice leads to Perfection.
My philosophy has never changed or altered. And this is what I put into each and every wheel that is built and sold by our company.
Attention to details matters most. And fully understanding how a wheel ‘stands’. There is a lot of mystery and voodoo surrounding the spoked wheel, but it’s actually quite simple in reality. It’s a tension supported structure. The spokes ‘pre-stress’ the structure with enough force to prevent de-stressing which would ultimately collapse the structure or a portion of it. The structure meaning primarily the hoop on which the rubber tire is mounted and anchored by an axle located at the centre.
With this in mind, to construct a solid, stable wheel, we need to have a hoop, hub and supporting tension members (spokes) that will all sustain the tension required to support the load(s) intended in both a static and dynamic fashion.
So, how to build this beast? Wheels roll, or at least that’s what we cyclists want them to do. And in order to roll with the least energy loss possible, they should be as round as possible and have as low rotational friction as possible. Building a round wheel is the key starting point, and where I , personally, put a lot of effort and time into getting it as perfect as possible.
But, what does round mean? And how round is round? In a perfect structure, round would mean that the hoop is suspended by equal length (exactly) members attached at equal distant points in the hoop and hub. Well, you could use unequal members and points, but we’ll get into that later. But essentially, we want the hoop to rotate exactly around the centre of the hub.
Since the hoop is somewhat flexible, getting it perfectly round can be a challenge. But having a precision building stand that allows for micrometer display of distance, can help the builder overcome this challenge and get very close to a perfectly round structure. I personally use a precision German building stand which allows me to measure accuracy up to about .05mm. Or even smaller with a higher sensitivity gauge. That’s quite small when we consider the structure has a radius of about 311mm. So, I like to think I’m working against a .015% accuracy goal.
Once I’m satisfied that the wheel can be built round – and in many cases I’m NOT satisfied due to variations in the components or poor quality – I move on to the next phase of building which is the iterative tensioning process. In multiple steps, I will add more tension to the spokes to bring up the structure to it’s desired pre-stressed specification. Along the way, I carefully monitor the radial and lateral position of the wheel itself. Once you start with a round structure, you should keep it that way! By using a building stand that provides both axial and lateral position measurement simultaneously, I can increasingly add tension to the spokes AND keep the structure within the building tolerances desired.
Since all materials are not 100% consistent , perfectly formed or machined, there will be some small variations required. How a builder manages these variations results in how ’true’ the wheel will be. I don’t consider ‘truing’ simply to be a wheel that doesn’t wobble, but more a round, stable structure that is precision located about an axis and is uniformly pre-stressed on each support member.
The Dynamic Wheel. As all cyclists know, the wheel is meant to roll. And when this happens, everything changes. The static wheel becomes a dynamic object. How the wheel reacts or responds to the dynamic aspects of riding must now be considered. This is the point where a master wheel builder brings salt to the table. With years and thousands of wheels of building experience combined with directly riding the wheels and listening to feedback from thousands of riders riding them, you start to gain insight into this extremely complex and complicated structure. The kind of insight that ‘tells’ you how the wheel ‘should be’. The black and white version is that the wheel just needs to be round, straight and stiff. And that a perfect wheel is ultimately as round, straight and stiff as possible. The greyscale version of this is that a wheel is also part of the dynamic suspension system of the bike, and combined with the rider, is a important part of determining the performance experience.
This is the part of building that I really love. I try to imagine myself as the rider on the set of wheels I’m building. Is it for racing? Touring? Commuting? How much does the rider weigh? What kind of technique? What are the roads like? All of this forms a scenario in my mind that I use to fine tune the structure accordingly. In a semi-production environment I tend to think more in terms of a broader audience, however the approach I take, for example in building a set of ultra lightweight ‘KOM’ wheels is quite different than the approach and final tuning steps I take in making a set of Super Randonneuring wheels. Our 38mm wheels are different than our 50mm wheels not only because of profile, but also because of approach. Everything I design, build and put into production is based on this type of approach. By continuous distillation of the process I can get better and better at this.
GS Astuto is about being clever. My heroes have always been the clever ones. Who challenge the status quo and don’t fear to rides paths unknown. When you ride a set of GS Astuto Wheels you are riding on the result of experience, cooperation and innovation. You are also riding my wheels, and I take that very serious.
I started GS Astuto about 30yrs ago with a couple of other young cycle racers. I was the ‘old man’ in the crew in my late 20′s and just off a stint of cyclotouring and racing in Europe. We were all Italiaphiles, if you’ve seen ‘Breaking Away’ , which was popular at the time, you’d pretty much have us nailed. Add in some basic punk-rock nature, pre-grunge socialism and the target narrows. But more than anything we loved to ride and race. And that’s what we did. A lot.
I had a repair garage business. I’m a good mechanic and worked on anything. From sports cars to bread trucks and everything in between. To me working on ‘things’ has always been a secondhand nature. Coming from a mixed farming, logging, aircraft and engineering mashup family history, being a mechanic and engineer was just in the DNA. Working on and building bikes was no different.
As a race team member, I was welcomed because of these skills. That , and I was a pretty good climber at about 129lbs and many summers working in the woods carrying 90lb steel ‘blocks’ up and down a mountain all day forges a bit of toughness and conditioning. When I wasn’t riding or racing, I was fixing and making. I picked up the skills easily. Not only did I understand the statics and dynamics of the machine from my engineering background and education, but I also had the hands to put it to the bench.
Of all wrenching I did, perhaps wheel building was the most enjoyable and intriguing. It involves a delicate layering process to take inherently weak components and construct something strong, reliable and durable. Every wheel becomes a legacy to me. A legacy of connecting the rider to the road in a unique way. No matter how many I build, I always find the process enlightening and learning. Tension creates structure. Structure creates object and the object carries us to new horizons.
GS Astuto went on hiatus after we ‘grew up’ a little and went our separate ways. After more than 20yrs, I returned to the bench. A new generation and new materials. Intrigued by the potential I started building again. And riding. They always go together for me. A wheel builder cannot exist without the other in my mind. Passion stems from Practice. Practice leads to Perfection.
My philosophy has never changed or altered. And this is what I put into each and every wheel that is built and sold by our company.
Attention to details matters most. And fully understanding how a wheel ‘stands’. There is a lot of mystery and voodoo surrounding the spoked wheel, but it’s actually quite simple in reality. It’s a tension supported structure. The spokes ‘pre-stress’ the structure with enough force to prevent de-stressing which would ultimately collapse the structure or a portion of it. The structure meaning primarily the hoop on which the rubber tire is mounted and anchored by an axle located at the centre.
With this in mind, to construct a solid, stable wheel, we need to have a hoop, hub and supporting tension members (spokes) that will all sustain the tension required to support the load(s) intended in both a static and dynamic fashion.
So, how to build this beast? Wheels roll, or at least that’s what we cyclists want them to do. And in order to roll with the least energy loss possible, they should be as round as possible and have as low rotational friction as possible. Building a round wheel is the key starting point, and where I , personally, put a lot of effort and time into getting it as perfect as possible.
But, what does round mean? And how round is round? In a perfect structure, round would mean that the hoop is suspended by equal length (exactly) members attached at equal distant points in the hoop and hub. Well, you could use unequal members and points, but we’ll get into that later. But essentially, we want the hoop to rotate exactly around the centre of the hub.
Since the hoop is somewhat flexible, getting it perfectly round can be a challenge. But having a precision building stand that allows for micrometer display of distance, can help the builder overcome this challenge and get very close to a perfectly round structure. I personally use a precision German building stand which allows me to measure accuracy up to about .05mm. Or even smaller with a higher sensitivity gauge. That’s quite small when we consider the structure has a radius of about 311mm. So, I like to think I’m working against a .015% accuracy goal.
Once I’m satisfied that the wheel can be built round – and in many cases I’m NOT satisfied due to variations in the components or poor quality – I move on to the next phase of building which is the iterative tensioning process. In multiple steps, I will add more tension to the spokes to bring up the structure to it’s desired pre-stressed specification. Along the way, I carefully monitor the radial and lateral position of the wheel itself. Once you start with a round structure, you should keep it that way! By using a building stand that provides both axial and lateral position measurement simultaneously, I can increasingly add tension to the spokes AND keep the structure within the building tolerances desired.
Since all materials are not 100% consistent , perfectly formed or machined, there will be some small variations required. How a builder manages these variations results in how ’true’ the wheel will be. I don’t consider ‘truing’ simply to be a wheel that doesn’t wobble, but more a round, stable structure that is precision located about an axis and is uniformly pre-stressed on each support member.
The Dynamic Wheel. As all cyclists know, the wheel is meant to roll. And when this happens, everything changes. The static wheel becomes a dynamic object. How the wheel reacts or responds to the dynamic aspects of riding must now be considered. This is the point where a master wheel builder brings salt to the table. With years and thousands of wheels of building experience combined with directly riding the wheels and listening to feedback from thousands of riders riding them, you start to gain insight into this extremely complex and complicated structure. The kind of insight that ‘tells’ you how the wheel ‘should be’. The black and white version is that the wheel just needs to be round, straight and stiff. And that a perfect wheel is ultimately as round, straight and stiff as possible. The greyscale version of this is that a wheel is also part of the dynamic suspension system of the bike, and combined with the rider, is a important part of determining the performance experience.
This is the part of building that I really love. I try to imagine myself as the rider on the set of wheels I’m building. Is it for racing? Touring? Commuting? How much does the rider weigh? What kind of technique? What are the roads like? All of this forms a scenario in my mind that I use to fine tune the structure accordingly. In a semi-production environment I tend to think more in terms of a broader audience, however the approach I take, for example in building a set of ultra lightweight ‘KOM’ wheels is quite different than the approach and final tuning steps I take in making a set of Super Randonneuring wheels. Our 38mm wheels are different than our 50mm wheels not only because of profile, but also because of approach. Everything I design, build and put into production is based on this type of approach. By continuous distillation of the process I can get better and better at this.
GS Astuto is about being clever. My heroes have always been the clever ones. Who challenge the status quo and don’t fear to rides paths unknown. When you ride a set of GS Astuto Wheels you are riding on the result of experience, cooperation and innovation. You are also riding my wheels, and I take that very serious.
"Roads Like These" - One of my regular test paths. Real wheels require real conditions.
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