c200ns

Just bought the spin doctor truing stand from performance. I replaced a spoke but loosened everything up and have the roundness and lateral and dish I belive ok. My only problem is that the tension of the spokes on the drive side might not be much different then the tension on the driven side. I know I should have more tension on that right side but how do I get it without messing everything up. It also might be possiable that my dish isn't perfect since I don't have the tool yet and am using a known good wheel.

thanks Norman

cachehiker

Plucking the drive side spokes should result in a noticeably higher pitch. If they aren't, your dish is probably off by a quarter-inch. It will be obvious when you clamp it in the dropouts and the non-drive side of the tire rubs on the stays. Adjusting the dish isn't hard. It just takes practice.

The basic park dishing tool is cheap, like $25. Compared to swapping my wheels back and forth on my Ultimate Truing stand, it saves me an awful lot of time. Also, unless you have a stable of similarly laced wheels that are known to be properly tensioned, a tension meter is a good investment. I use to do OK without one but once I bought one, the wheels that had stayed true all measured 1000-1200 Newtons and the wheels I had to true up a few times measured around 800 Newtons. The spoke tensions on all of them felt and sounded right to me.

IHateGlass

i've not used that stand, but to get a good idea of the dish get one of the feelers touching the rim, then take the wheel out and replace it the other way round.

The gap between feeler and rim will be twice the dish error.

Hope I'm not teaching you how to suck eggs!

lunacycle

I'm also using the Spin Doctor truing stand. You really need to buy the alignment tool, which is essentially a plastic triangle with two bolts at the ends of one edge to engage the fork-ends of the truing stand. The alignment tool allows you to center the notched gauge (for lack of a better description) within the truing stand. It's not all that precise, but you should be able to get the rim centered within about 1mm using the little notches as a guide. I think the alignment tool is about $8, as I recall.

As for your rear wheel tension, assuming you aren't using a track hub, then your spoke tension will be much greater on the drive side then on the non-drive side. I believer Gerd Schraner recommends about 225-250 lbs on the drive side, and about 165 lbs on the non-drive side, for your typical box-style rim (Open Pro, etc.).

Tensioning the rear wheel takes a bit of trial and error. You need to tension the drive side first, pulling the rim far to the right, before tensioning up the non-drive side. It doesn't take a lot of tension to pull the rim to the left, because the spoke angle on the non-drive side gives more of a mechanical advantage for moving the rim than does the right side.