Bicycle Mechanics - Normal to get some wheel runout on a new bike?

Picked up my new bike yesterday, Cannondale T800, and went for a quick 5 mile easy road trip after which I noticed I had some lateral runout on my rear wheel. I would spin my rear wheel and it would oscillate as I looked at the rear brake pads to almost touching the pads but not quite. I assume a little runout is normal on a new bike? I'll be going back in for my re-check/adjustment inspection at my LBS in a week or so and will have them true the wheel. Will this be an ongoing issue that I will have to deal with and adjust for or barring any impact or other physical damage to the wheel will my wheels stay true after the LBS trues it up? The front wheel shows no signs of runout at all, only the rear wheel at this time. I'd like to learn about runout and can a novice correct it on his own bike? I like to do things myself if I can but would never want to try a repair I was not qualified to do on my bike.

The most common wheel problem on bikes with new, machine built wheels (like yours) is that they're under-tensioned, and the spokes aren't stress-relieved before the bike is ridden.

On a touring bike, this can lead to disaster.

The shop should retension the spokes (using a tensionometer) and stress-relieve them (gripping adjacent pairs at the middle and squeezing) before performing the final truing. This should be done on all new wheels, but all-too-often isn't. The result is almost inevitable spoke failure.

You don't what that to happen on a loaded tour out in the middle of nowhere. The time to properly prepare a new wheel is before it's ridden.

Once you have a set of wheels that are properly and evenly tensioned and stress-relieved, they will last forever, barring trauma.

Here's a link to a full explanation of stress-relieving, by Jobst Brandt, author of "The Bicycle Wheel," from the rec.bikes faq.

http://draco.acs.uci.edu/rbfaq/FAQ/8c.1.html

RichC

Thanks Rich. I'am calling my LBS now to have this adjusted and fixed.