Originally Posted by
Banzai
I mean; I build my own wheels, and have built wheels for friends at cost...no charge for my labor, save for maybe some beers. Fairly recently a friend asked me to build him a basic Open Pro/105 wheel set, and I had to tell my buddy that he would actually do better buying from Performance. I couldn't source the parts alone for as cheap as Performance was selling the built up wheelset.
How on earth do wheel builders turn any profit at all?
Properly built (likely at least hand-finished, although Holland Mechanics does make a stress-relieving machine) wheels never break spokes (for at least the first 300,000 miles can be over 10X as long as it takes to wear out a rim's brake tracks) and don't go out of true unless you hit something hard enough to bend the rim.
Machine built wheels under a heavy rider sometimes have fatigue failures after a few thousand miles and may not stay straight for the first few hundred. While theoretically a shop could make them right before sending them out the door and doing so is not hard that usually does not happen.
So, people who know better and can afford it are often willing to pay a wheel builder hundreds of dollars extra for the same parts.
prowheelbuilder.com gets $90 in labor per wheel plus parts. My incompetent LBS gets $70. Peter doesn't live in California with expensive shop space.
Custom also gives you more options, like velocity rims with color options seemingly as plentiful as a box of Crayola crayons.