Originally Posted by
elcruxio
I've tried to true wheels on the dropouts of a bike but never built one. All my wheelbuilds are stand builds.
While you can build a wheel on the bike I feel the ergonimics, speed and precision you get with a proper truing stand has so far more than made up for the expense of the stand. Especially when you have eight bikes to true or build wheels for. And there's going to be even more wheels added when the little demon graduates from the trailer to actual bikes.
I have a simple park stand that wasn't all that expensive when I bough it. Now however I'm considering on getting the Park Tool TS-4.2 and that's pretty expensive. But that'll true all the wheels.
Then again the most important tool of all is the tension meter, which I should really calibrate at some point.
Anyway. My point is that if wheel building isn't one's hobby, then it's not a bad idea to pay someone to build fatbike wheels instead of doing it yourself.
That's pretty well where I'm at. I've never really felt the need to build wheelsets because I've usually been able to easily find what I want. I know how to true of course.
But the fat bike sizing is the pita that may have broken the camels back. Even specialized Canada, the maker of my bike, doesn't list the stock wheelset for it.
Down the road I may choose to DIY but a problem our American friends might not experience is the lack of vendors and high cost/difficulty with shipping to other countries. Sometimes it works out, sometimes there is a big cost and sometimes the US vendor won't ship. Comparatively speaking, we live in the pre industrial era
Even our own shops can't get it together.
(rant) I set out to get the tires mentioned above before Christmas. The local shop website said they had them in stock, so I went there but they did not actually have them. "In warehouse, allow 10-14 days shipping". Ok, I was there, so I ordered them, at a premium price.
21 days later I had to go back to the shop (1.5hr round trip) because they wouldn't ship to my address, only to the shop. Crazy. I wanted to support a local LBS but I could have bought them from Chain Reaction for less and had them delivered to my door in 4 days. (rant over)
As to a local building the wheelset. One guy quoted me $1000 CAD and I had to supply the hubs. arghh... I suspect they have never built a fat set before.