I built a ghetto wood stand for my truing stand:



Took the rear wheel off of my Hybrid - had a lot of side to side wobble and a little bit of hop. I spent about 30 minutes trying to true the wheel and ended up with it being worse than I started out with no clear indication of where I needed to make changes.

I had a few spoke nipples that were really tight and one that almost rounded off even using the appropriate spoke wrench.

I have a little oil bottle with a needle tip - I put a tiny drop of oil where the spoke meets the nipple all the way around the wheel and then I took the tire/tube/rim tape and put a dab of oil under each nipple where it meets the rim and let it sit for a short bit.

I then loosened all of the nipples up until there was zero tension on the rim and then I turned all of the drive side nipples down to the same depth [i.e. fairly uniform tension around the whole wheel, but only on the drive side].

I then turned the wheel and tensioned the drive-side of the wheel down to get rid of axial runout [i.e. to make the wheel as round as I can / removing as much 'hop' as I could]. During this process the wheel had a ton of lateral runout [side-to-side wobble] but my goal was getting a round wheel and fairly even tension on the drive side.

It didn't take me too long to get it tensioned fairly evenly and the wheel round.

I then tensioned the non-drive-side spokes evenly around the wheel and once everything was getting snug I began working on the lateral true.

By the time I was done all of the spokes were pretty darn close in tension - I do have a tension meter that I used [only to very once I was done] and I verified that all of the spokes on each side were within 2% of each other roughly as far as tension. The drive side spokes are higher in tension than the non-drive-side simply due to the casette taking up some space but well within spec.

I ended up with extremely little runout in both directions - axial and lateral.

I put the wheel on the bike and put some weight on it and rolled the wheel a few times and heard a little bit of pinging [I did try to keep the spokes from twisting while tensioning, and the lube helped]. I then put the bike back on the stand and checked the tension on all of the spokes and checked for runout and the wheel is in great shape now.

Now that this is done I was able to remove some slack from my rear brakes [had them opened up due to brake rub from the wobble].

The only thing I've noticed now that all of this is done is that as the rear tire spins the casette itself wobbles left/right maybe 0.25~0.5mm. It looks to me like perhaps the axle itself is bent? I'm not sure - open to suggestions/thoughts on this.

I figure at some point these wheels will be replaced as they're cheap [came stock on the bike at $400 or so] but since they're cheap I can tinker with them to learn wheel building/truing without worrying about trashing them [as they're cheap and easily replaced].