Originally Posted by
Sixty Fiver
Bolding mine... and we are the same page here.
I don't think the customers who have been riding on the wheels I have built for thousands and thousands of miles and who have never had a problem feel like they have been cheated... to date I have had 2 wheels come back to my shop after they failed... one had been hit by a car and another one had been run over by a car.
A few have come back because the rims had worn out after 25,000 - 30,000 km where they needed no servicing.
My partner has been building wheels for over 40 years and uses no tension meter... I have never seen better built wheels than these and he passed on a few secrets he learned from master wheel builders.
Nice to have self proclaimed amateurs tell us how we should be doing what we do, and I do break out the tension meter to calibrate the fingers from time to time but it is not a tool I depend on to build a fine wheel.
Like I said, there are other ways to determine optimal tension with a tension meter and the proof is in the pudding.
How do you know your partner's wheels are so well built? Can you see it? Do you make measurements? Nah, you wouldn 't want to do that. It wouldn't be mystical enough. "Fine" wheels can't be tainted with measurements.
And BTW, FSB got the saying right: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." It's not, "The proof is in the pudding."
And just so you know, self-proclaimed amateur is not an insult.