Originally Posted by
himespau
Oh it didn't take long to lace them. It's the truing that takes forever. I get them true within the current settings of the stand, stress relieve by squeezing paired spokes, true, stress relieve, true, set the stand feelers closer together and repeat. Then I check tension, find some are way over and some are way under, so I unscrew back to where I can see a single thread and start over. Well, then I take a day or two off because I'm ticked off. Or currently, I've got it true, but I know that I'm not going to be happy with the tension because I can see a thread on one of the spokes and that means starting over, again. I guess I just suck at truing. It seems like tightening one spoke a quarter turn while loosening the neighboring spokes each a quarter turn shouldn't be rocket science, but apparently it is because I suck at it. Didn't have this problem with my last build (using Sapim Race instead of Laser), so I'm blaming it on wind up with thinner spokes, but I just suck at it.
Once you are into the process, forget about that bottom thread thing. When you find an overtensioned spoke, just deal with it. There is no telling how it got that way. Could be spoke length tolerance, thread number tolerance, nipple length or thread tolerance, and so on. Don't worry about trying to go back to scratch as you will likely just end up in the same place over and over again. Since you are constantly building tension up to the level you think ideal, it is not hard to keep the spokes similar to each other. If the wheel is radially true (round), the wheel dished or undished correctly, and the parts are not faulty, you should be able to get the wheel nicely true and all your spokes tensioned evenly (per side for the rear) with similar (notice I did not say identical) depth in the nipples at the end of the process.
Oh, and by the way, don't forget that loosening/tightening a spokes affects the tension of adjacent spokes. Say you have spoke A with tension meter reading of 14 next to B that is 10 midway through a build. If you tighten B to 14, you will find that A has "loosened" to maybe 13 (it depends on a lot of things). You are taking some of the load off A by tightening B. Complicates things, but that is just the way it is.