Originally Posted by
Kevinti
I'm glad some of you guys are having confidence with the tool (Park TM-1) but I am not impressed with the quality of the offering. The sliding metal surfaces all interfere with each other and the anemic, hopefully teflon, "bushings" are so thin that the loose tolerances of the assembly bring the whole tool into question. Still saying all this it is useful. I am not sure I would use it to build a wheel because the sloppy tolerances mean that you would have to recalibrate after every 20 or so squeezes of the tool. I find it useful to run through the spokes on a side to see if they are all close to each other. The tool allows me to see if one or more are way out of bed but using the values on the scale is not somethign I would trust.
I build about 200-500 wheels per year.
Break a TM-1 spring about every 1000 wheels.
Have three TM-1s (one of which is very very old...) and a couple spare spring kits.
Only have to recalibrate every dozen wheels or so - which only takes 5 mins max.
For the current 80-100 bucks it goes for now...it does the job.
There's your trust statement.
We'll now return to our scheduled programming...
=8-)