Originally Posted by
MNBikeguy
Listen, most people here including myself are not building wheels regularly. Without that experience I doubt we can easily distinguish a middle F ping, or a flat spot without a relatively inexpensive tool designed for the task.
After your 4 wheels, if you feel you’re on a par with Jobst (the king of wheel builders) and can build a wheel - that lasts - with your thumb and a ball of twine, by all means go for it. The professor built a nuclear reactor with four coconuts. The only place such extraordinary feats occur are bike forums and Gilligan’s Island.
I've built exactly one wheel and I did it mostly because pre-built IGH wheels are fairly expensive. So while I certainly wouldn't mind having a truing stand (or a repair stand for that matter), I'm kind of on the fence on whether or not I'd use one enough to justify the cost. It would have been cheaper (and less time consuming) to lace the wheel myself and then take it the the shop for tensioning and truing than it would have been to get a good truing stand.
To me a truing stand isn't doing anything magical, so I don't see it as a necessity. My wheel turned out fine and while I've only got a few hundred miles on it, I suspect it will still be in good shape years from now. And if it's not, it will have been the result of improper tensioning rather than a problem with truing.
Wheel building isn't something I figure I'm going to do a lot of, but it's nice to know that I can if need be. For the most part I'm happy to buy the wheels pre-built and would only build my own if I needed something more specialized like a dyno-hub.
FWIW I haven't bought a headset tool, crown race installer, or star-nut installer. Yet I've manage to install all of the above. Just like building your own wheels, there's a certain satisfaction that comes from fabricating or improvising your own tools.