Interesting little story about a wheel I built last week. I rebuilt another old wheel with a freehub instead of a freewheel hub (27"). I had grabbed a badly damaged Nishiki road bike frame (bent fork, bent top and down tube) last week and dragged it home. I cut off the downtube and top tube and kept the rear triangle. I was lazy and just used my thumb as a placement marker for a truing indicator. Tightened up all the spokes 1/2 a turn until I had what felt to me to be fairly decent tension. Trued it up quickly just to get a rough starting point using my thumb as the truing indicator. The dish looked fairly okay to me as well when I flipped the wheel around in the frame.

I then brought it to my bike coop yesterday to do the finishing of the wheel-lateral, radial, dish, tension. I didn't have time to work on it but threw it in the expensive park stand. The lateral true was off by about 2mm at most. The radial was off by 1mm at most. And the dish was just about perfect, off by about 1/2mm. i was amazed at what you can accomplish with nothing more than the Park truing tool $10 (the triangle one, NOT the awful round one), a free junked bike frame rear triangle, a $20 digital micrometer, and my time.

I figure when I go back to the shop on Thursday, I will only have to do the final truing and finish up the tension. The shop manager was pleased how close I came with doing it with just the ultra basic tools at home.

This week I am going to build a simple wooden base for the rear Nishiki triangle and I am going to cut off the steerer on the bent fork. I will then mount the fork to another wooden base and I will then make some truing indicators using random parts. Cheap usable homemade truing stand for front and rear wheels. One thing I am going to do is cut off the stay bridges on the seat and chain stays. That should allow me to spread the triangle easier when I insert various sized hubs into the home made stand.