Originally Posted by
Andy_K
That sounds like what Sheldon Brown recommends. I had a hard time picturing it, in spite of his pictures, but I think I've got it now.
The Jobst Brandt (spoke squeezing) method just seemed uncharacteristcally vague in his book. He tells you that doing this wrong is the cause of most wheel failures, and then he says to squeeze "hard".... I may be overthinking this, but I like things to be measurable when they're important.
Stress relieving is actually a real engineering term, but most people including professional wheel builders gets it completely wrong. Usually people confuse it with getting rid of spoke windup by eg. side loading the rim so the spokes loose tension and therefore may unwind. That however isn't stress relieving spokes. Here are some Jobst Brandt quotes on the subject:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/s...relieving.html
http://yarchive.net/bike/stress_relieve.html
Sheldon Brown method may work too if you got weak hands (don't scratch or kink the spokes though), but the squeezing method is the safest method since normal humans can't squeeze hard enough to cause any damage.
How hard? Well, make an effort, don't be gentle or afraid you damage the wheel. Personally I use a towel and squeeze with both hands. In the one of the Usenet post linked above, JB writes that squeezing may raise the tension for the grabbed spokes between 50% to 100%. So if you stress relieve the spokes at 50 kgf (random number) they should be around 75 to 100 kgf when you squeeze. Not sure if a tensiometer can give proper results when squeezing, but the feeling of eg. around 100 kgf spoke can be gotten by squeezing a finished front wheel.
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Regards