Originally Posted by
motobecane69
... I now suspect that I may have the long short long short thing going on.
Well, if the nipples seem to tighten up OK, that's not it.
Originally Posted by
motobecane69
right now the wheel looks like 8 pairs of paralell spokes on each side.
Sure.
In, say a 36h 3X build, you can find (almost) parallel pairs if you take one heads-out spoke, then jump over 6 spokes. The 7th spoke should be a heads-in running pretty much parallel. In a 2X pattern it'll be the 5th spoke that's kinda parallel.