FBinNY 

Now, you're just reaching. Yes, we use measuring tools.

The debate boils down to your belief that it's necessary to use a tension meter to verify uniform relative tension in a wheel, and those of us, who believe it isn't. You're free to believe what you wish, and to work accordingly, and you're certainly free to pass up dealing with those of us who don't use a tension meter this way.

furballi

There are too many variables to come up with a rule of thumb. My rear wheel was hit by a careless driver. Had to crank up the spoke tension way up on the drive side. Two of the spokes on the non-drive side was loose. I'd say spoke tension ratio is a little more than 3:1 between non-drive and drive sides. I was able to true this wheel to +/-0.003" after the accident. Still true today after 19K miles, although I had to recheck every 5K miles to keep the wheel from drifting more than +/-0.005".

Hub is 32H Shimano 600 with butted 14/15 DT spokes and Maxtrix rim.

furballi

An experienced builder checks spoke tension with his/her eyes, fingers, and ears. There will always be some sort of compromise made with each wheel. I always select round flat rim and will reject anything that deviates more than 1 mm. This assures tight grouping of spoke tension readings when the wheel is properly assembled and stress relieved.

Sixty Fiver

I went to UBI to get certified since I am already certifiable, and not because I expected to learn much, I ended up helping to teach the course and tutored my classmates as they lost one of the instructors and had realized that I had more experience than anyone else.

Besides the shop management aspects of the advanced class we had practicums and one of those was to build a wheel.

I did that in my usual 45 minutes and the junior instructor came by to check my work and broke out the tension meter and said he had never seen anyone build such a perfectly tensioned and true wheel.

He almost keeled over when I told him I never used the Park tension meter... he had never been taught any other way.

This is not to say that I did not check the tension... I just did not need a tension meter to tell me if it was right.

I use a tension meter when I need to... when I teach wheel building classes I stress that building a sound wheel is more dependent on skill and experience and that if you are not experienced then the tension meter is your friend.

You should see my trueing stand... at it's simplest it was an inverted fork with zip ties for indicators and now it uses dial indicators and is more effective dishing wheels than a dishing tool since I build them like a machinist would.

fietsbob

Mas 02,

dishless wheels have equal tension side to side , but inorder to get in a multi speed cluster , you either add more axle width on both sides ..

some Tandem hubs do that .. 145 ~160..

or the right side has to be tighter to pull the hub shell sideways. to the left ..

rpenmanparker 

That is the only point I have been trying to make all along, that and also most folks don't have the inherent skill to do as well as a meter. Not talking about you, talking about most folks. We all have different needs.

rpenmanparker 

Yep. On purpose. It's a conversation. Ideas being worked out between people. Reaching is allowed.

And I think the debate has moved on. You have convinced me you don't need the meter. Neither sixty fiver. Well and good. Now I would like to convince you some (actually most) people always will need a meter to do as well as you and to know they have done it. Your skill is IMO rare. At least at the level of top notch wheels. Nobody I know has that ability, least of all me. Whether it is due to lack of inherent talent or just never having a reason to build enough wheels to develop the skill, makes no difference. For the normal person thirty pair or so in a lifetime just won't do it. For those without the skill the meter is the leveler, what allows me to build wheels as well as you. That is saying something, right?

rms13

Wow, this thread has taken on a life of it's own!

Back to my rear wheel ... I am getting a lot of experience truing wheels through this process but I can't get the up/down hop out of the wheel. I've managed to get the side to side true within 2-4mm which seems acceptable to have brakes close enough to the rim for good stopping without rubbing. But I can't get rid of the up and down hop. I feel very confident in my approach at this point from reading dozens of tutorials and watching several videos. I understand the concepts of small adjustments to pairs of spokes, tightening to bring closer to the hub loosening to move away. At his point I seem to have two hops almost directly across from each other.

Is it possible the rim is warped? Is it possible the spokes just need to be replaced at this point?

I just want to get this bike on the road and trying to decide if I should buy a new rear wheel or keep working on this one. If I do buy something is it ok to run lower spoke count in the back? The current are 36h and the best deal I've found a new rear 126mm 6 speed 700c wheel is 32 h

jyl

How bad is the hop? Put the wheel on the bike and ride it. Can you feel the hop, does it interfere w/ braking? try it, you may be surprised at how little (or not at all) it actually matters.

I wouldn't want mismatched wheels on my bike, and especially a rear with lower spoke count than the front. It's like wearing mismatched shoes.

FBinNY 

Hops are tricky and take the most skill to manage on a tight wheel. One reason is that the rim is an arc, so changing the radius means flowing metal along the circumference. We're not talking about much, but the spokes in the area to either side will resist.

High spots aren't that hard to fix because the local spokes are pulling and they can be forced in. But the rim needs someplace to go, so see if there's a low spot elsewhere, or loosen spokes to either side slightly to allow the change. This may or may not be needed depending on how tight the wheel is, but the key is to note the spokes that are resisting the movement on either side of the work zone, and loosen those. It takes a bit of touch, so you have to work in small changes.

Low spots are trickier, because you can't just push them out. So loosen the spokes in the area, then tighten those elsewhere, especially those that will pull the rim toward the low spot.

All this work affects the tension balance, so you have to be aware of spokes becoming looser or tighter than average, and try to bring these back.

Some rims are more resistant to change than others, especially deep section or heavier rims. For those you need to apply some brute force, after providing for the bend by relaxing the affected spokes. I often push out low spots with my foot while pulling on the wheel (think isometric leg stretch).

IME- building a wheel is easier than aligning one because builders are controlling everything, while repair means dealing with a wheel that already has issues.

rms13

Thanks guys. I know that a hop may be less noticeable once a tire is mounted and I try riding but this one seems very noticeable to me with the naked eye so I feel like I should address it. Thanks for the tip.

MikeDVB

I built a ghetto wood stand for my truing stand:



Took the rear wheel off of my Hybrid - had a lot of side to side wobble and a little bit of hop. I spent about 30 minutes trying to true the wheel and ended up with it being worse than I started out with no clear indication of where I needed to make changes.

I had a few spoke nipples that were really tight and one that almost rounded off even using the appropriate spoke wrench.

I have a little oil bottle with a needle tip - I put a tiny drop of oil where the spoke meets the nipple all the way around the wheel and then I took the tire/tube/rim tape and put a dab of oil under each nipple where it meets the rim and let it sit for a short bit.

I then loosened all of the nipples up until there was zero tension on the rim and then I turned all of the drive side nipples down to the same depth [i.e. fairly uniform tension around the whole wheel, but only on the drive side].

I then turned the wheel and tensioned the drive-side of the wheel down to get rid of axial runout [i.e. to make the wheel as round as I can / removing as much 'hop' as I could]. During this process the wheel had a ton of lateral runout [side-to-side wobble] but my goal was getting a round wheel and fairly even tension on the drive side.

It didn't take me too long to get it tensioned fairly evenly and the wheel round.

I then tensioned the non-drive-side spokes evenly around the wheel and once everything was getting snug I began working on the lateral true.

By the time I was done all of the spokes were pretty darn close in tension - I do have a tension meter that I used [only to very once I was done] and I verified that all of the spokes on each side were within 2% of each other roughly as far as tension. The drive side spokes are higher in tension than the non-drive-side simply due to the casette taking up some space but well within spec.

I ended up with extremely little runout in both directions - axial and lateral.

I put the wheel on the bike and put some weight on it and rolled the wheel a few times and heard a little bit of pinging [I did try to keep the spokes from twisting while tensioning, and the lube helped]. I then put the bike back on the stand and checked the tension on all of the spokes and checked for runout and the wheel is in great shape now.

Now that this is done I was able to remove some slack from my rear brakes [had them opened up due to brake rub from the wobble].

The only thing I've noticed now that all of this is done is that as the rear tire spins the casette itself wobbles left/right maybe 0.25~0.5mm. It looks to me like perhaps the axle itself is bent? I'm not sure - open to suggestions/thoughts on this.

I figure at some point these wheels will be replaced as they're cheap [came stock on the bike at $400 or so] but since they're cheap I can tinker with them to learn wheel building/truing without worrying about trashing them [as they're cheap and easily replaced].

Al1943

If it was mine I believe I would completely disassemble the wheel and try to make the rim round and laterally flat. How well this can be done will depend on how badly it's bent or warped. You may need some wooden blocks and a rubber mallet. Or you may be able to grab opposite sides of the rim and push it against a big tree. Work slowly and correct the shape of the rim a little at a time. Any improvements you make to the shape of the rim will help with evening the spoke tension and with lateral and radial truing.

Keep the hub to rim spoke lengths as even as possible, especially during the early stages of building the wheel. Remember that it is possible to have even spoke tension on an out-of-round wheel, even if the rim is perfectly round and flat. Keeping the wheel round is most important during the early building process. Even tension, dishing, and lateral truing becomes important during the last phase.

Sixty Fiver

A very nice fellow I am acquainted with used to own a bicycle shop here decades ago and he has passed along a number of his vintage tools... most were designed to be used on old roadsters and the tyre levers are such that they would destroy an alloy rim but were fine for heavier steel rims and the solid tyres on very old kids bikes and tricycles.

I have yet to snap a picture of the rim straightener / puller he gave me... it was nicely cast and is designed to take low spots out of rims. Have not tested it yet but know the design and expect that it should be effective and useful.

I agree that repairing wheels is much harder than building them and I have done more than my fair share of that... it really teaches you the dynamics of how wheels work and makes building new wheels with fresh new parts to be a much easier task.

capsicum

(caution sleep deprived rambling may follow )
Farmers don't guess at crop nutrition by eyeballing the leaves, they use a tissue and soil analysis labs.
Boats (other than for nostalgia) are not hewn by craftsmen they are fully engineered for shape and strengths.
Does Boeing rely on good hand fitted joints or do they use a scanning-laser data collector and alignment system that needs several hundred gigs of memory for handling all of its measurement data?

Could I build adequate duck and hen houses the old way by fitting in pieces that I custom cut and trim at each step? Yes, and I have. But I generally don't and I get a much finer result by drawing it with a cadd program and using exact dimensioning for every length and angle and precutting every piece before assembling anything. I know before a single screw has been driven that it will be a quick assembly with a strong, square, plumb, outcome. Because numbers.

The mechanics trade ceased to be an art or craft decades ago, it became a technical trade soon after the science boom of the late 19th century, though some low precision trades [like bicycles] have taken their own sweet time to catch up. Yes, bicycles are very low precision in many ways.

Any business worth its investment runs by the numbers and the only way to do that is to know the current numbers and to figure out the tolerances and targets. IOW, is it or is it not in spec., how do you know, and how close are we to the margins?

As for customers knowing your process, they have every right to ask and you have every right to put a price on that info., and they have every right to agree or head on down to wheelbuilder #2 .
I'd be a dang fool if I didn't inquire as to the methods a chef uses on my food.

rms13

There's some truth to that. You could give detailed step by step of how to build the perfect wheel and 99% of people would still rather buy a complete one. Most people don't have the time and certainly not the patience to do it right. Most people I know that ride would rather pay an LBS for all the work they need because it's more convenient and we are in a society that is willing to pay for convenience. Despite all the cooking shows all over TV these days, the good restaurants I go to are still packed. Even the not so good chain restaurants I go to are packed.

Earl Grey

Is there really a premium for the 'convenience' at all in this area? Hand-built sets from reputable sources seem to cost no more than buying the components in retail quantities.

FBinNY 

It's always nice to have people who can't do something well and efficiently tell those who can that's impossible.

Good wheels have been built reliably for a century without the "precision" measurements some here insist are necessary. Even tension is achieved through good practice and methodology rather than the "measure and correct" method some advocate.

In any case, there's the question of cost. Measure and correct might be OK for a home mechanic, but isn't practical or cost effective for a commercial operation. In order to keep hand built wheel labor reasonable, wheel has to be built, start to finish in under half an hour. Otherwise (do the math) it would be unaffordable. So skilled builders rely on methods that don't require the type of work and rework that the measure and correct folks need.

Measuring for quality control is good practice, but the goal is that the vast bulk of the output passes. That requires a method that consistently produces work that's right well before it gets to the inspection station.

Sixty Fiver

Interesting that pretty much every off the peg wheel I see has come from a factory that makes these wheels always need some post purchase work.

Taught another class last night and a new Specialized road bike had a stock back wheel that had gone out of true after very few test miles while the ancient Trek 8000 mountain bike on the handbuilt Rolf wheels (low spoke no less) were still dead true after many thousands of off road miles and after serving as a tow vehicle to haul a kids trailer.

Compare that to the handbuilt wheels I roll around on which never need touch ups as well as the wheels I build for customers.

I think my hands, eyes, ears, experience and a few sets of dial indicators are pretty good tools for checking the quality of a wheel build.

Spent the weekend doing mobile events and I don't carry a truing stand since every bike that rolls up doubles as that, and I tuned up a lot of wheels.

My friend has a set of wheels under his full suspension mountain bike that I built up 3 years ago and he is a big dude (300 pounds with gear)... these wheels were built to a tolerance of less than 2/1000 and after a year they were still within 2/1000 and after three years they are still within 2/1000.

Another customer hits the curb at 350 pounds and his custom mtb / urban wheels are going into their third season... he tells me that they are still as perfect as the day they were delivered and he has no need for any service on them... they are also the only wheels he has over owned that he hasn't killed in short order.

The 0/0 racing wheels I got from Arvon, that were built 20 years ago (and raced) are still absolutely perfect... the build quality and tolerances are astounding.

I build tandem and touring wheels, racing wheels for mtb and road, and wheels for commuters which probably see more abuse than any others... I get no complaints.

None.

Zero.

I'm out.

goldfinch

I think a lot of the analogies where measuring creates a better product are not on point It really is an it depends on what you are doing.

My father tuned pianos with a tuning fork and his ear. His pianos were in tune. I learned to tune a piano from him. Now most all piano tuners tune from digital tuning machine which shows the frequency. It is faster but no better if you trained your ear. So, in this case "measuring" helps.

I played violin. You tuned the A string to a fork or known pitch at 440hz and used your ear to tune the other strings. Most players still tune all but the A using their ear. Perfect 5ths are easy to hear and you can check using harmonics. It isn't going to be more in tune by checking the frequency of the other strings using a machine. However, I understand some beginner violinists do use a digital tuner. I think they are not doing their ears a favor. I also see more and more guitar players tuning with digital tuners. I still only tune one string by frequency and then use the ear for the rest. I am not going to be more in tune by checking my work as my ear and experience gets me where I need to be quickly.

Rowan

I am caught here. I have built quite a few wheels over the past decade-plus, and trued quite a few. I have a wishlist at the moment that includes a Park centring tool and a tension gauge.

The centring tool is a given, but the tension gauge? I am now not so sure.

I have got by all this time by tensioning the spokes by feel and then by plucking them to determine that pitch is fairly close right around one side of the wheel (or both on the front). I started out building just on the bikes, then went to a cheap wheelstand, and now have one that includes dials.

My wheels have done extremely well -- I have had to adjust only two, one on a MTB, in that period when the distances they have covered number in the tens of thousands of miles.

I am thinking I will go ahead and get the tension gauge anyway, because I like the geek and validation factor as much as anything.

adamgoldberg

I don't know so much about wheelbuilding, being rather a novice, but was taught that the purpose of the tension gauge was to make sure that the spokes are tensioned enough (that is, each spoke has more than a minimum amount of tension), and to attempt to get approximately the same tension on each spoke around the wheel. Yes, you can do this by sound ... but it's much harder to teach/learn "ping" not "ding" than it is to say "measure each spoke, take the average, if the average is >=20 and no spoke is out of the range 20+-2, and it's round, dished, and true, then you're done."

FBinNY 

I guess an analogy can be drawn to riding bicycles. Any child can ride a bike with training wheels. But the goal is usually to learn to ride without. Likewise the goal should be to wean new builders from reliance on using the tension meter to find uneven tension, to building in a way that tension stays even throughout the process. Of course, learning to determine average tension is harder, but even that can be mastered too.

I teach wheel building by the sink or swim method, and students are not allowed to use a tension meter until it's time to check their finished work. Not only do they build even tensioned wheels without a TM, they KNOW the wheel is evenly tensioned before they check to confirm.

MikeDVB

When I rebuilt my wheel that's basically what I did - I built it using the best practices as I had been taught and then used the TM as a final step just to double-check due to my lack of experience. I did find one spoke that I didn't tension properly - but I found it by sound prior to using the TM and then used the TM once I was fairly certain it was all even already. They were all really close barring a couple that were a little higher due to irregularities in the rim itself that I straightened out with tension but still well within spec and pretty close.

Been riding the wheel a bit now - pretty happy with it . It's not perfect but it's close.

Al1943

I think the Park TM 1 at ~$60 is a very good investment if you plan to build more than one set of wheels. And I agree with most others that you really don't need it but it sure is nice to set the drive side tension on the rear wheel as high as is practical so that you can set the non drive side high enough to avoid spokes breaking from insufficient tension and still center (dish) the rim.
As far as economics are concerned I'd rather spend reasonable money on a tension meter than on a dishing tool. You can center the rim accurately by reversing the wheel on a truing stand.