Similar story. As a student I bought an old bike and restored it thanks to lots of info I found from Sheldon. And building a wheel was such a fun but weird experience. Part mechanics, part art.

I ended up writing my thesis on bicycle wheels after this. Or, it's a thesis on optimization algorithms, but I managed to play around with optimizing wheels as the "real world application". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410813