I'm actually very fascinated by Mike's class. It's a mix of technology and art with some antique mysticism rolled in. After all, there's so many variables in wheelbuilding and some of it not easily quantifiable where you can attribute the results to a sprinkling of purple fairy-dust. Having a minimum of measuring tools and knowing how and why you're using them really does remove some of the vagueness and magic out of the process.
On the Avenir spoke-wrench set, that's a great deal for 3 wrenches. They are very similar to the Park wrenches of the same colour. On new wheels, they work great. For really difficult corroded nipples on wheels dredged out of a lagoon, I prefer the 4-sided wrenches. But these require more time to insert over the spoke-nipple and the benefits won't be needed by beginning wheel-builders anyway.
BTW, during my 10-years at a shoppe, we destroyed lots of calipers through abuse; dropping and stepping on them, getting smashed by other tools on the countre, etc. Didn't matter if they were stainless-steel or plastic, they had a limited lifespan anyway. We ended up stocking a tonne of the $2 plastic ones. Having 0.1mm precision is good enough for all bike work and we actually sold quite a few of them to customers as well.
Last edited by DannoXYZ; 11-16-10 at 12:10 PM.