Old 09-25-19, 07:31 PM
  #5  
79pmooney
Senior Member
 
79pmooney's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Portland, OR
Posts: 12,915

Bikes: (2) ti TiCycles, 2007 w/ triple and 2011 fixed, 1979 Peter Mooney, ~1983 Trek 420 now fixed and ~1973 Raleigh Carlton Competition gravel grinder

Mentioned: 129 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 4808 Post(s)
Liked 3,936 Times in 2,559 Posts
Those Park gauges are good, but they do not build you a good wheel. They do help a lot in ensuring your tensions are within the limits of the spoke. Building a good wheel means finding the best balance between even tensions and a true wheel. Unless your rim is perfectly flat and round and your spokes uniform in thickness, getting both uniform tensions and perfect true will probably not be possible.

I build my wheels to have generally even tensions, be round and be side-to-side true; in that order. If I don't hit the first, it will be a short-lived wheel. The second - reasonably close to round, it won't be a pleasant ride. Perfectly true is what you do to impress people. Makes very little difference riding until contact with brake shoes happens.. To get the relative tensions even, I don't mess with a gauge. I can hear pitch and pinging spokes with my spoke wrench is so much faster! Periodically I put the gauge on several spokes to make sure the overall tension is what I want.

Ben
79pmooney is offline