Rubato

A well known bicycle trade school teaches advanced wheelbuilding in partnership with a major spoke manufacturer. The course requires passing a written test and the building of both a front and a rear wheel. Wheels are graded on a 100 point scale for each of 4 elements; lateral true, radial true, dish, and consistent spoke tension. Points begin to be deducted with deviations of 0.1mm. The greater the deviation, the faster points are removed. A passing score is 75 points for each wheel.
I have difficulty visualizing measurements at that level and the instructor suggested setting a digital caliper at 0.2-0.3mm on the bench and looking at the jaws as I built the wheel.
My definition of "TRUE" is much tighter now than it was for all those previous wheels I "never had to touch up!"

noglider 

@FBinNY, you made me feel better about having to touch up my wheels every few months. Nowadays, I'm happy enough when my wheels are visibly wobbly but not enough to rub the brake pads. And as for roundness, tires are less true than just about any wheel.

Mind you, I do like to get things pretty straight when I true them, but it is so that I know they are better than I need them, not because I believe I need things to be within 0.5mm.

I've never used a tensiometer, and I have a feeling I would score badly in the evenly tensioned parameter.

Drew Eckhardt 

Yes. I wanted a pair of 2000-2006 Record hubs with matching skewers and bought a set of wheels using them instead because the price was about what the skewers alone were worth. After bending my usual front rim on a pothole I decided to try those wheels as-is and broke a front spoke causing the wheel to go out of true. I already knew to build my own wheels so that wouldn't happen and didn't need the reminder.

jyl

I can see the appeal of wheels trued to within 0.2 mm, for the perfectionist. For the more practical, I wonder how laterally true a wheel really needs to be.

I like to set up my brakes so that the pads are close enough to the rim, that the pads will contact the rim after a small amount of lever pull, like 1/4 inch [edit: checked, it is more like 1/2" to get any discernible braking] movement at the lever tip. AND, When applying the brakes either gently or hard, I don't want to feel pulsation. That requires a certain degree of lateral true. Something <1/16th inch, call it 1 mm, is probably good enough. So it makes sense to me to aim for better on the initial build, so that after weeks or months of riding, the true will hopefully stay < or = 1 mm. I am not sure why I would need the wheel to be more true.

As for radial true, I am less concerned about it. As noted above, tires and roads are lumpy. I have some rims that have a stubborn 1 mm hop, and I have never felt it when riding. Maybe the effect of radial out of true increases as you go faster, but the faster I go, the more things I am thinking about besides my wheel's trueness.

I'm often working with old, used rims, which maybe is why my standards for true are, apparently, not that strict. I have to build another set of 35 year old Fiamme Ergals soon, and I'm not going to torture myself or the rims to get 0.2 mm trueness!

onbike 1939

I've never had to re-true any of the wheels I've built in over thirty years but now I've been pretty well humbled.

After a pretty traumatic accident I find that both of my wheels are now out by as much as 0.02 mm and it's a bitter pill to swallow.

My friend, who has always been extremely supportive keeps saying, over and over....well what do you expect after a nuclear explosion.... but it really doesn't help.

RollCNY

Robert, do you mind if I ask a related/corollary question: what criteria must a wheelset meet to be considered reliable? If a wheel does require truing at some increment, does it make it unreliable?

The reason that I ask is that there was a Road Forum thread several months ago on a factory wheelset (can't remember which one) and whether it was reliable and "bomb proof". Several posters commented that their wheels were trouble free after 5000 miles, and people started weighing in saying that that was insufficient mileage to determine reliability, and that a wheel could only be considered reliable if it took no maintenance until the brake track wore out, some 30000 miles later. So a product could only get that moniker if it had been run to failure. And once that was said, people jumped in offering support to that premise, saying a reliable wheelset could have zero issues until it reached catastrophic failure.

That seems to me to be a ridiculous measurement. So I know it is different than your question, but it seems connected. You consider truing to your original build spec to be routine, and are surprised that others don't do that. Others seem to think any effort between builds is a failure. I kind of think that a properly designed wheel for the rider and type of riding would be somewhere in the middle.

RoadTire 

Happens every time I put my bike in the car. Front wheel locked in the fork, true. Front wheel on the car seat, not true.

Booger1

Does destroying a back wheel count?....Done that on a touring biike many years ago......

HillRider

The wheels I described in my posting above, with the exception of my OEM Bridgestone's, did not require truing until they were replaced due to brake track failure or the brake tracks got so thin I knew failure was imminent. And, yes, I do check them on a truing stand once in a while and have just about always been pleased with the result. That said, I certainly don't consider a wheel that needs a bit of touch-up now and then to be unreliable but it shouldn't be a frequent or routine necessity.

StephenH

Wheels going out of true hasn't been an issue for me so much. Spoke breakage has reared its ugly head a time or two. I use disc brakes, so a wheel can get noticeably out of true and still work okay, until it starts rubbing the frame. I've had spokes that seemed noticeably looser, but the wheel still seemed true.

But it is entirely possible to have wheels last a good long while without going out of true. On the "light strong cheap pick any two", I go for strong and cheap.
I know some people that put gobs of miles on a bike, but it is spread out over multiple bikes, too, and they're lighter than me by a fair bit, too.

RaleighSport

I buy used bikes and wheelsets typically, so I do quite a bit of initial truing, despite being a lightweight rider I also knock wheels out of true with a bit of regularity (go fast road bikes excluded)... I guess some people can keep them true if they baby their bikes like I do my road bikes, but it seems unlikely as occasionally even those wheels need to be thrown on the stand and adjusted.

rpenmanparker 

I agree with you completely. The middle case is much harder to quantify than "always a problem" and "never needs to be looked at". All I can say is if I have been riding a wheel set for a few months (say 1,000 miles just for grins) and I notice a little brake rub or maybe just nearly so, I can't get all excited. I will take the offender off and retrue it with the tire/tube in place, and that's that. I ride my calipers pretty close to the rim, so this is a fairly rigorous standard.

Reliable to me is the wheel not collapsing, spokes not breaking, hub not tearing at the spoke holes, spokes not pulling out of the rim spoke holes stuff like that. But periodically being slightly out of true doesn't make a wheel unreliable to me. I try to keep my expectations regarding all aspects of bike reliability and durability very modest, particularly since I am a weight weenie at heart. I enjoy working on the bike, and needing to do so doesn't offend me.

CliffordK

Every once in a while I'll throw my wheels up on the stand, but I'm a bit lazy with it.

I think the new Aero style rims may be a bit stronger, and with better aluminum than the old boxy rims like the old Rigidas, so perhaps they'll stay true longer.

I'm pretty gentle on my wheels, but I did hit a deep pavement rut/crack with my last rear wheel, I think. It gave it a permanent hop, and wobble (hard to fix both). I rode it for several years like that, but finally replaced it this spring. Now, 1500+ miles on the replacement, and still good. I did touch it up on the stand once after the initial break-in, but I can never be certain that it was worse than my initial build.

In the past, 1mm tolerance was "good enough".

I have found quite a few wheels out of true on used bikes and kids bikes. I usually do a bit looser tolerance on the kids bikes. They sometimes have an obvious dent in the rim.

RollCNY

Your experience and explanation matches mine. I do think most of my hand builts are overbuilt for my weight and style, but I'd rather over build and worry the maintenance less than under build and do too much touch up. I have definitely had wheel reliability issues in the past, but they are usually post catastrophe (broken spokes from pot hole hits or unplanned automotive contact).

reddog3

Well there's a new standard in wheel "trueness." Most of us don't have measuring instruments graduated less than .001" and can't measure that, which is roughly eight-ten-thousanths-of-an-inch.

rpenmanparker 

He was joking. I can't tell it your were.

Velocivixen

FWIW I can say I've never had a flat tire. And no, I didn't just start riding yesterday.

hueyhoolihan

i figure anyone mentioning a tenth of a millimeter or less in a thread about wheel truing is making light of something. including this one.

FBinNY 

They say "Lucky at cards, unlucky in love". How does lucky in tires fit in?

Don't answer, but I remind you that you might be tempting fate by saying you've never flatted.

Jiggle

Yes, my DA C24 set goes a little out of true, and my xr200 hand built goes a little out of true. But I am brutal to them so it doesn't surprise me. My xr270 set goes out of true the least often.

Velocivixen

Don't think for a minute that I didn't wonder the same thing as I was deciding whether or not to post that. In all honesty, though, I just mounted some tires with new tubes, have not even ridden the bike yet, and I think​ I might have a pinch flat!!! So, there you have it. I'm doomed.

FBinNY 

A new record for bad Karma.

mconlonx

I build my own wheels, build for others, and true wheels of all shapes and sizes.

On my own wheels, I may take shortcuts and call good enough good enough. I've been known to have to true such wheels on occasion.

On wheels I've built for others, lifetime free truing service. No one's come back. Unsure whether they were disgusted by wheel build and brought elsewhere for service, to someone competent, or if just none of my wheels have gone so far out of whack in 1-5 years that customers just have noticed.

One set I built for a guy who hammers his bikes needed a couple 1/8 turn adjustments to get back to perfect when I was tuning his bike, but it was all DT Swiss stuff, and I credit the material quality rather than my meager skillz. He'd killed a couple other supposedly quality aftermarket wheelsets before biting the bullet on custom wheels...

I true other people's wheels all the time. Most bikes which come into the shop for their first service can use some wheel truing. Most bikes being built up out of a box can use some wheel truing. And I even had to true/re-dish a custom rear wheel which went into a custom build by the same supposedly well-reputed pro wheel-builder.

As someone else mentioned, it is a sad state of affairs when some $65 Sta-tru wheel comes in truer than a Bontrager RXL. Other wheels I've been impressed with right out of the box include QBP Handspun assemblies, and Velocity wheels/sets. Both of whom, as far as I know, have wheel-builders on-site or at least hire locally.

hueyhoolihan

refreshing to read a post from someone with a sense of proportion, and humor, about this.

jyl

No, VV, you have still never had a flat while riding. Which is all that counts. That tube could have been defective from the factory. Cling to karma!