In preparation for building up my own wheelset I decided to try my hand at truing all the wheels on all the bikes in the stable. So I scoured ebay and won a Park Tools TS2 wheel truing stand and a WAG4 wheel dishing tool for a deal.

Working through 4 wheels now, I've sort of developed a method and also noticed some tendencies that I wanted to hear the pros thoughts on.

Method -
1 - I check for roundness and any hops on the wheelstand first. If any, I will get the calipers to touching the rims edge at the highest section, back off just a touch and loosen all the spokes until the entire rim edge touches the caliper.

2 - I will then begin truing the wheel using 1/4 turns and tightening the calipers until things start getting tight and then make small adjustments, sometimes just a nudge in either direction.

3 - Once things are tight and round, I will then check for spoke tension by squeezing the spokes. I keep the calipers close to the wheel but not as tight as during final stage of truing. So far at least, all my spokes at this stage are rather loose so I give all the spokes a 1/4 or half turn depending on how loose they all feel. I'll check spoke tension after the first round and give them all another 1/4 turn. I'll repeat this step until I feel like the tightest spoke is really high. All the while I'm doing this, I'm checking the wheel and calipers to make sure it doesn't go out round.

4 - one final check for truing. Usually at this point, I just need to make small adjustments, nudges here and there.

5 - I check with the dishing tool, but the final wheel I didn't since the truing process seems to get the wheels into dish.


One thing I have noticed working on these old, most likely machine made wheels, is that the drive wheel spoke tension on the drive side has really stretched over time. The two drive wheels I worked on were out of dish towards the non-DS side.

Would love to hear your thoughts.