Koyote

If the OP's wheel is true and round, it's probably fine to just ride it.

mrwang199432

yeah the wheel is pretty true, I was just wondering if the varying spoke tension was to be concerned about, I'm just going to ride it as long as it remains true!

pdlamb

That's a perfectly valid decision; there's a good chance the trueness would be affected if you (or the shop mechanic) tried to balance tension.

Two minor things you can do to mitigate the possible ill effects of this decision. First, spin the wheel before every ride. Watch the rim (or distance between brakes if you've got rim brakes) and see if it's developed a lateral hop. If it has, a spoke has come unscrewed and needs to be tightened. Second, after roughly every dozen rides, do the plink test on the NDS spokes. Again, if a plink or a plunk has progressed to a thud, that spoke needs to be re-tightened.

Jeff Neese

You can do that if you want. The worst that can happen is you break a spoke or the wheel goes out of true sooner.

Still, any good bike shop should have someone that can retension a wheel. It does require some experience and practice, as you've probably learned watching videos on the topic. You need to find an experienced wheelbuilder and form a relationship. Good ones are hard to find.

KerryIrons

What is missing from this discussion is how uneven the tension was before you took it to the shop. They might have really messed up the wheel or they might have done the best possible job with a wheel that uneven NDS tension to begin with. cxwrench (and others) gave good advice: if the wheel is round and true, just ride it. Keep track of how well it holds its true because if it comes out of true quickly then the wheel job wasn't a good one. Uneven tension is indeed a source of spoke breakage, but since we have no idea how much variation there actually is, we can't make any predictions.

jlmonte

Looks like my drive side F# is sharp

Non-drive E flat is also sharp

You got me thinking, so back to the Park stand!
NDS F# ish. While the other side E flat is a little sharp. As bad as a bass player I’ll confess to, I’m worst at plucking spokes.

In general they are fine. As a Clydesdale I am not holding much hope for the cross pattern or spoke count. But much of my beliefs are old school, as the book I referenced. There are better materials now that allows for radial spokes in a rear wheel.

As @ Zandoval; mentioned, you can start getting the tools, I got my stand for $75 from a Sport’s Authorty going out of business sale.

urbanknight

As long as all the spokes are within a safe range of tension, it should be fine. That's hard to tell without a tension meter, though. Might want to ask the shop how they true wheels.

Russ Roth

Keep an eye on Amazon warehouse deals as well. Managed to score the newer version of your stand for 150.00 with tax shipped to my door, cheaper than wholesale. Got a single arm pro repair stand the same way, was listed as used-good, the box was damaged pretty bad but not certain what damage would have been done to that much steel and chrome.

Gonna guess, based on years of experience, that they turned spokes till it looked straight. Probably have the basics of tighten/loosen in pairs and even tighten the loosest feeling ones first but I've never really seen techs break out a tensiometer unless it was something special or a special request.
Those of us that built wheels would have the practice to really feel for what we were doing and could do it faster but that wasn't common in my experience. You can also check spoke tension visually but it is a trick, does help when truing up wheels quickly though.

Jeff Neese

Reading through all of these replies, it's clear that tensioning wheels is no longer universally understood or practiced in a lot of bike shops these days. What do these shops do before they deliver a new bike to a customer? They don't check wheel true and spoke tension any more? Very few wheels come perfect right out of the box, especially with today's machine-built wheels.

It makes a huge difference in how strong the wheel is, so anyone thinking it's not important is hopefully just cruising around their neighborhood. If you're going to tour coast to coast, carrying a lot of weight or want to go bombing down a mountain trail, you need good strong wheels and that means properly tensioned spokes.

I personally don't perform this myself. I have an experienced wheelbuilder at our LBS and he does a great job on all of my wheelsets, including building new ones. If he left I would have to find another bike shop.

pdlamb

Some 20 years ago, when my wife and I were shopping for new bikes, the mechanic commented, "If you both want to buy a bike, since they're the same size, it'll take me about 20 minutes to get the second one out of the bike and build it up." This wasn't K-mart, this was a bike shop. My guess is he would have spun the wheels after he put them on and aired up the tires.

Fast forward 10 years, getting a broken bike replaced 10 miles into my first tour. Lead mechanic (different shop) said, "You're on a cross country tour? Let me check the wheels before you leave." One wheel needed to be touched up 2,000+ miles into the ride, the other 5 minutes 1,000 miles later.

Based on those experiences, I'd guess the "standard of care" for wheels coming out of the box is ... zip. Just like checking grease in the bearings, or bearing pre-load, the default is to take it out and put the wheel on the bike. Presumably if the bike gets ridden a lot, during the warranty replacement of the first spoke they'll look at the rest of the spokes and touch them up (aka tension them adequately) at that point. Or up-sell the customer a fancy set of new wheels. Of course, as in my second example, some reason for concern comes up during the selling process, the sales person or a mechanic who overhears the conversation may take a second look at the machine built wheels.

Russ Roth

there isn't much to check the way there used to be. Every bike needs wheels checked for true, rarely they aren't reasonably round. Just spin the wheels to check axle tension, true as needed and assemble. Tensioning wheels has never been universally understood, this oddball notion that every bike tech at a shop knew all the ins and outs of wheelbuilding is something made up about "the good old days" of bike shops. I worked with a guy who spoke often of the glory days of the bike boom of the 70s and what absolute crap the bikes were. But even then they were selling them so fast they were largely slapping them together, bending whatever was needed for them to ride straight and sending them out the door. Newer wheels need less work due to better materials and better machinery. True them and send them, most will never be ridden enough to matter.

urbanknight

I used to work at a shop about 20 years ago. It was expected that I take no more than 15 minutes to assemble a new bike. 12 if it was a single speed kids bike. They come mostly assembled, so we just needed to put the last few parts on, adjust the brakes and shifters, check the bearings, and check all the fasteners. We would spin the wheel and fix it if it looked horribly off, but I don't even recall if that ever happened my whole time there. Of course if the bike were for me, I'd want to be more picky, but my boss just wanted them safe enough to put on the showroom floor in as little time as possible.

While it's true that machine-built wheels are usually not perfect out of the box, they are almost always safe and rideable. They're usually spec'ed very safe as well (high spoke count, strong/heavy rim). Anyone touring or racing would likely seek an expert and pay closer attention to their equipment than the typical casual rider.

cxwrench

Wow, to put those kinds of time limits on bike builds, even out of the box bikes is nuts. At least you didn't have to deal w/ cheap disc brake bikes.

urbanknight

That was par for the course at every shop I knew, and totally doable since the bikes were mostly built already. It was just difficult to stick to the basics coming from my meticulous home mechanic mindset.

As a matter of fact, I recently bought a bike from Pro's Closet and technically assembled it in 15 minutes like they say. The rest of the hour was spent changing saddles, adjusting the fit, adding pedals/bottle cages/seatbag, and admiring it lovingly.

But yeah, only the top of the line downhill bike in our shop came with disc brakes back then, and the head mechanic built that. I still need to learn how to service those.

Branko D

The last four sets of factory wheels were perfectly functional out of the box and I've only touched them with a spoke key after significant enough crashes 🤷

I frankly wouldn't worry about it. If the wheel doesn't make any sounds and is true, I'd just ride it. If it starts to click or squeak then I'd worry about tension.

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Russ Roth

Gonna back up urbanknight on this, when I started 22 years ago it was expected to have a bike ready to ride out the door in 20 min max, during the winter when I might spend the day doing nothing but a schwinn frontier, raleigh c30, trek 700 or something similar the first two were expected to be slower as I made sure I knew the idiosyncrasies of the bike(every c30/sc30 one year needed every cup and cone BB readjusted) and then it was expected that I would have them completely ready to ride in 15 min and the top goal was 5 an hour. Even last summer when I did some bikes, 20min for an entry level disc bike out the door wasn't all that big a deal. If you know what you're doing what to look for and how to evaluate and you're doing well over 20 bikes a day, it isn't hard to get it done and get it good.