Originally Posted by
Charles Wahl
This warning doesn't square with my experience. A good shop that I've been a semi-regular customer of has been perfectly amenable to taking a correctly-laced wheel build and doing the truing for me.
True enough. I wasn't talking so much about truing a wheel once it has been strung. My experience, limited admittedly, is that a shop won't touch a used rim. I assumed GB was re-stringing a wheel he had had for a while, and that he was wanting it to be string right instead of just trued.
About Jobst Brandt's preferred stringing, IIRC his only real point was that if the drive side had trailing spokes and they were rigged head-in then the increased tension of pedaling hard could cause the crossover point to shift to the outside slightly, reducing the clearance between spokes and RD cage. But he also said it was so small with a well-built wheel that it didn't make much difference.
When I built my first wheel I followed Sheldon Brown's instructions, laced and trued it carefully, then commuted on it for 1000 miles that summer. It is still on the Peugeot and still going strong. That's a good place to start and a good place to finish!