Originally Posted by
ItsJustMe
I was worried about proper tensioning, and was thinking about buying a tension gauge, but a friend said "just slowly ramp up the torque, keeping the wheel in true at all times. Keep going until it feels like you're about to strip something." It worked for me, and I later built a front wheel around a disc hub, and that one also is absolutely true after 8000 miles of riding.
That's the method I use to build a wheel, but how do you apply the same philosophy to maintaining tension over time in order to prevent a wheel from becoming visibly out of true or breaking spokes?
The problem is that when you build it's easy to keep the tension even because you're starting out with all the spokes being the same, but when maintaining a wheel you're starting out with the spokes uneven.
Going by the pluck test gives me misshapen wheels (which I discovered much to my dismay after trying to perfect a perfectly good wheel by fine tunning the pitch without actually looking at the wheel...by the time I was done it hummed like a church bell, but it looked like a taco). I'm not sure if this is because the pitch is unreliable due to spoke crossing and resonance in the rim or if it's because manufacturing imperfection requires uneven tension to compensate. I'm not sure a tension meter would help either.