Just built my first wheel
Nothing major but it feels good to have taken another step in my skills. I had some hard anodized rims on my vintage Trek 1500 that I really disliked for a number of reasons. The spokes were 20 year-old straight gauge and I had broken a couple over the past season. I had another set of wheels sitting around with some decent Alex doublewalled rims on no-name hubs also with straight gauge spokes. My first thought was to just swap the better rims to the better hubs and reuse the spokes but the wheel builder at my LBS suggested replacing the spokes and nipples. He selected double-butted DTSwiss spokes and white brass nipples for my project.
So I completely disassembled both wheels and cleaned up the rim and serviced the hub. Using Schraner's The Art of Wheel Building and some photos I took of the old wheel as a guide it took me about an hour and a half to assemble and roughly dish and true the wheel. I don't have a truing stand so I'll have to wait until I can get an evening at the bike co-op. The 3x pattern wasn't nearly as difficult as I had imagined but I spent several minutes shaking nipples out of the rim until I figured out a better way to insert them.
I'm not trying to make a big deal out of this, but just wanted to encourage anyone who has been putting off trying their hand at wheel building to go for it. It's actually kind of fun.