I've got a couple threads going on wheel building but wanted to talk about this specifically. The more I look into this, the more I really don't know. I've read that 1mm radial and 0.5mm lateral is considered good. Also the opinion that 20% tension deviation is serviceable, 10% is alright, and 5% is getting good. What is muddying this more is they don't give any qualifiers to what those numbers actually mean. Is that 1mm radial peak to peak, or RMS, average?, deviation from the median? But then some people said +/-1mm... wait, so that implies 2mm p-p. I've also seen (more than one) person say they sand the seam on AL rims so they can acheive 0.001" tolerance.... Thats nearly 2 orders of magnitutde difference! To contrast I saw someone who had a wheel they were quite proud of that was nearly 30% out on tension.

These specs are all over the map. I'm curious what people here consider adequate/good/great, but also if there's some definitive accepted tolerances to compare with. I'm sure all of these wheels are completely usable and the numbers (past a certain point) are only acedemic. Still, as someone who's learning it'd be nice to have solid goals to aim for. Is my wheel ok for a novice? Should I do better? How good do the numbers have to be to be proud of my build if I wanted to be OCD?