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.

Assuming you are not using bladed spokes, you need to stress relieve the spokes. When you turn the spoke nipple, the spoke will twist a little. If you don't stress relieve them, the first time you use them, you will hear the spokes pinging, when the stress relieve themselves, causing the wheel to go out of true.

To stress relieve the wheel, lay in on the floor and press the edge of the rim. You will hear pinging. Work all the way around the wheel until you hear no more pinging. Now, re-true the wheel. To minimize the amount of spoke windup, over adjust the nipple a little, then back it off a little. Stress relieve the spokes again, and re-true if you hear more pinging.

If you have bladed spokes, you can avoid spoke windup by using a tool to hold the spoke while adjusting the nipple. You can also look at the spoke to see if it's twisted.

I've build several wheels using bladed spokes and find it much easier as long as you hold the spoke to keep it from turning.

zze86, Stress relieving the wheel is important. I use a "flag" on the spokes and for a truing operation a bobby pin works fairely well...if you have daughters they're everywhere.

Brad

Yes, many factory wheels have the rim a bit to the NDS.

I'd suggest reading a book or two - a short and a good one for start is this:
(Professional Guide to Wheel BuildingBy Roger Musson)

Wheelbuilding book for cycle wheels

Worth it in the long run, giving a complete guide to building and repairing wheels.

Other book I'd recommend is Jobst Brandt's The bicycle wheel:
https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-Wheel...SIN=0960723641

At the risk of picking at nits, this isn't really stress relieving the wheel. It's untwisting the spokes. You have to overstress the spoke to the point of yielding to stress relieve it.

This is one way to perhaps do both, although the side of the wheel that's getting stress relieved is opposite to the side that's getting the spokes untwisted.

You need to stress relieve regardless of spoke shape.

Stress relieving has nothing to do with relieving windup.

When the heads are formed parts of the elbows aren't take past their elastic limit and retain high residual stress. With the number of fatigue cycles survived dependent on average stress (high in those parts of the elbows) and variation (worse for heavier riders) this can radically reduce spoke life from 300,000+ miles to thousands.

That only removes windup.

You need to take the elbows past their elastic limits. You can do that by squeezing near parallel pairs of spokes in each side towards eachother or twisting the spokes about eachother at their outer crossing using something softer like a plastic screwdriver handle, old left crank, or brass drift.

Sharpie dots on each spoke or a tape flag on representative samples (front, rear drive side, rear non-drive side where the first after the valve stem hole is intuitive) will show how much windup is happening so you can undo it.

Thanks for the pointers, keep em coming! Will definitely check out the books as well!

Get a tensiometer.

I totally forgot about that! I actually received the Park Tools version for Christmas, but I didn't have the wheel stand yet so just stashed it away.

How would you use this thing? I mean I know how to use it, but when is a good time for application? What is a "good" range?

The side loading method of attempting to stress relieve a wheel is the worst method to use AND just simply refuses to die as an idea...just like:

1. Zero dish wheels. (99.99% of all wheels are dished - they have to be.)
2. Tie and Soldering for stronger wheels (It's a safety feature, not a strengthening feature.)

You're not a calibrated machine with a database of tested load parameters to apply for a given wheel configuration.

Simplest method is to wear gloves, grab parallel pairs of spokes on both sides and squeeze VERY VERY hard.

...and completely avoid the risk of tacoing a wheel in the first place.

=8-)

Once the spokes are all fully tensioned, any truing you do should be considered a "zero sum gain", meaning, any place you add tension, a roughly similar amount must be removed. If you don't, you quickly end up with an over-tensioned wheel, and rim breakage.