Symox

This won't get a whole lot of use, but I'd like to transition from using my frame and brake levers to something better

Any recommendations for <$100

Thanks

cyccommute 

The Sunlite Deluxe doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles but it works and it’s cheap. I build a lot of wheels early in my wheel building using a stand like that one.

thook

Minoura has an offering or two, as well, I got the FT-1, but they've replaced that model with something else. Mine was $80, but new ones are still less than $100

Andrew R Stewart 

A few comments- Common reasons for using a wheel truing stand are space/bike stand lacking, ease of seeing the rim and indicators and beliefs in a stand held wheel somehow the results will be better (because most shop mechanics will place a wheel in their truing stand before saying too much).

The first is understandable but I will always suggest a bike repair stand before a truing stand as far more can be done with less hassle. Second is certainly preference (and old age eyes like mine). Third and the assumption of a truing standed wheel will result in a better outcome is questionable. This all depends on the wench's skills and abilities.

Missing is the actual truing stand's design/functions. It needs to hold a wheel (you pick the standard/size), have some sort of indicator to show rim run outs, maybe allow for true dishing checks, and maybe be more repeatable. Holding the wheel is getting more complicated with through axles and such. It's likely that most low cost stands will only handle classic threaded axles and a axle length range of 145-100 aprox. Dishing a wheel really likes it's own tool but good stands can reduce the "fudge factor" by flipping the wheel around many times. This brings us to what I think is the #1 aspect of a truing stand, it's rigidity/stiffness and repeatability of rim alignment checks.

This is where a bike frame/fork is actually better then many shop grade stands and all the cheap consumer ones I've seen. The ability to have the wheel not flexing about as you spin it back and forth during the truing is underrated, till you've trued a few wheels in the same session. The quality of axle fit and stand distortion if you have to clamp the QR down. The stand's rim indicators not having a lot of slop and hold their position. Real drop outs and well secured brake pads serve very well to hold and show a wheel's changing condition.

My opinion is that most cheap consumer stands I've seen are too flexible, too limited in their axle fit and spec. and are no better then using one's frame/fork. I strongly suggest playing with a wheel on a stand or three before you spend your $. Andy

VicBC_Biker

DIY stands are a possibility if you are 'handy', and have a shop with woodworking tools.
The one in the Musson book looks pretty solid.
https://www.wheelpro.co.uk/wheelbuilding/book.php

GMull

I got the book - print out at home - made the stand and built two wheels, although not quite finished yet, as a bit more truing to do. I also made the dishing tool. Never built a wheel before and found the book easy to follow. You can see the wheels on my request for frame identification.

pdlamb

I got a Performance branded Minoura touring stand similar to this one:
Minoura Wheel Truing Stand | Wayfair

It's worked well for me for quite a few years. Alas, that was from a time when axles weren't plagued by the proliferation of "standards," so you may have to look into what your bike/wheels take now.

GhostRider62

I have a 30-40 year old Minuora that probably cost me 20 bucks. I tried to bend the steel arm or somehow invalidate the repeatability of measurements. It works fine for my needs. One time I am glad I did not spend the huge bucks on the Park professional job

3alarmer 

...I have built and trued a lot of wheels using an older version of this stand. The advantages are reflected in terms of its portability and folding for storage when not in use. My own needs run toward something I can move around, place on the floor for certain operations, a kitchen table in the winter when it's too cold out in the workshop, change the angle of the wheel with respect to my own seated or standing position, etc.

It is, as stated above, much more flexible in nature, but I don't find it that hard to work around that, given the other advantages in my own situation. I did not realize Minoura is now selling something they call "Advanced". It looks like it will accept at least some through axle designs.

adipe

when truing wheels you need to pay attention to radial runout on each spot of the rim (at each spoke). as i said in another thread... radial runout at each spoke.

adjusting radial runout is best done at roughly medium DS tension with NDS (non drive side) spokes having almost zero tension. you just need to add a tiny bit of tension on the NDS so that you have good enough lateral true when adjusting that very important radial true and also balancing it out with spoke tension variance.

you should not aim for absolute zero radial true if that means you don't have uniform tension on those DS spokes. that is because spokes stretch under tension.

very few wheelbuilders are skilled enough to do this balancing of tension variance with radial true without the use of any computing device. even if they have tons of experience they won't always reach the optimal build but will either be lucky and some of their work will be sloppy for the sake of expediency.

an example:
for 2mm spokes with 290mm length and +/-13kgf tension variance you will have +/-0.04mm spoke length.

having a truing stand with no dials to show the amount of radial true at each spoke means you need to work a lot to achieve almost zero radial true (less than that 0.04mm) and then you should take note of each spoke's tension to have some adjustments made after that radial runout was taken care of. if the tension variance is small enough then you are lucky with a rim that is almost perfect from the factory. having to work with a damaged rim... a cheap truing stand won't really help much.

a professional truing stand would have some dials to show radial runout on any part of the rim so that you would assess spoke tension one way or another and find the compromise. with practice you could do without any computing device that you could have worked with while you don't have experience in assessing tension variance with your ear alone and everything else. plucking the spokes will not give you accurate and complete information, especially if you haven't checked with numbers what your ear tells you. you could resort to a tension meter or a tone generator but you also need to have the elastic modulus concept applied while you work with numbers. if you don't do that then you will have sloppy work. sometimes you will have a lucky build, sometimes not.

my first time i worked on a wheel - repairing it - i resorted to zip ties and optics for assessing radial runout at each spoke (deviation from the mean distance). i had a zip tie move and another zip tie fixed at a small distance and i used a paper on the window to have a rough estimation of the radial runout at each spoke. what i did was moving my head/eye to find where the aligned zip ties were pointing on the paper i had fixed on that paper on the window. i measured the thickness of the tapes i put on the rim where the flat spot was to have the max radial runout and then did all the adjustments with tension values noted down. very tedious work. i won't ever afford a professional truing stand so i'll always go with such a process because i don't want wheels built/repaired by so called professional mechanics and i also want resilient wheels (not only very very low lateral and radial runout) so i don't need to ever spend time repairing them once i'm done all that work.

the thinner the spokes are the more important all this is. there are more things involved when wheel building; beside this radial adjustment what is very often neglected is the right lubricant and reaching zero residual torsional stress.

take notice that nipple/eyelets will have a bit of bedding in meaning you should have a second (final) stage at that radial adjustment (at about medium DS tension with NDS almost slack). that bedding in does not need to happen under large dynamic loads when riding the bike. if you stress relieve the wheel you take care of that too. also, the more residual torsional stress the more likelihood the spokes will spring back and will also unscrew a bit from the nipple once large dynamic loads happen. eliminate torsional stress before stress relieving which should be done in stages.

adipe

the edge of the rim is sometimes a bit damaged so that the radial dial takes the tire bead surface with this truing stand.
last time i worked on a wheel i had the inner surface of the rim (next to the eyelet, tire mounted) measured - optics involved with a laser tool.

as for lateral runout... i don't care for exact measurements. i just minimize it as best as i can (<0.1mm) using just a zip tie.

cyccommute 

Another wall of overkill essentially based on nothing.

Why? What reason do you have that this is sooooo important? Will it result in a stronger more durable wheel and what evidence do you have for your claims?

This is not bad advice for what it is worth. Doing adjustments to both lateral and radial true are far easier at low tension. But that doesn’t mean that corrections can’t be made at higher tension.

Huh?

Very few wheel builders have ever used a computing device to build wheels. People have been building wire spoked wheels for close to 125 years. Computing devices have only been available widely for 30 to 40 years. Somehow, people were able to build wheels that were strong, durable, and capable of moving a bike down the road without falling apart. Even today, few people actually use a computer program of any kind to build wheels and still manage to cobble together a workable wheel.

And, here’s a clue for you, no computer program would be able to do jack crap without data from someone building wheels. Modelers like to say that there is nothing wrong with their models but they have it wrong way around. There is nothing right with their models without real world testing. All models are wrong. Some are useful.

And why do I need a computer to tell me that? And what is the computer going to tell me about how to go about fixing the problem? Let’s not forget that the rim compresses up to 0.2mm when the spoke is weighted which makes that ±0.04mm variance unimportant.

To put your radial true measurements in perspective, that slightly less than the average human hair...0.06mm. Again, what purpose is served by your insistence on that level of runout? You can spend hours on tweaking a wheel to perfection but what do you get out of it? Park doesn’t call for anywhere near that kind of precision. They say

For radial, they suggest 0.5mm. Their radial true suggestions are 16 times less precise than you suggest. I would trust them over some guy on the internet how doesn’t have any data to back up his ideas.

And, yet, the vast majority of professional truing stands don’t have...nor have they ever had...dial indicators but, somehow, we have been able to make workable, strong, and durable wheels. Here’s a hint: It’s not “luck”.

And how many hundreds of wheels have you built? I know you won’t answer (he has me on ignore) but perhaps someone else will ask the question.

Symox

I do appreciate your in depth response. Lots of great info but I gotta say this seems like overkill on accuracy. I can’t imagine tires themselves have the kind of radial precision. I admit I could be wrong and don’t mean to offend.

pdlamb

Call me a slob if you want, but I'm usually happy to get radial runout on my "experienced" wheels less than 1 mm or so. And yet strangely enough, most of the bone-jarring vibration I experience with such terribly crude wheels seems to show up on old, rough pavement -- the kind of road that would benefit if public works would come put a coat of tar and gravel on it.

0.05 mm? How's that compare to the thickness of a playing card?

adipe

aiming for low radial runout is NOT that much about how the wheels feel but how resilient the wheels will be with low spoke tension variance AND high enough average spoke tension (meaning also that the lowest spoke tension is also high enough).
generally speaking you want uniform spoke tension and in order to also have very low lateral runout you also need to figure out the radial adjustment.

...
the best i could do when repairing a BENT wheel (having taco and also flat spot) was +/-6% spoke tension variance, +/-0.05mm radial... and the lateral runout was quite the same.
the tension variance was according to the runout at each spoke, not random. meaning i had numbers for runout at each spoke and also tension of each spoke so that they were balanced out (elastic modulus taken into account).

i had those precise adjustments done before bending back the wheel into shape by stress relieving procedures which involved spoke pressing and rim pressing, quite strongly... at very high spoke tension (~190kgf DS and NDS spokes) so that i backed off on the NDS tension after all was done.

i'm not expecting average joe to use numbers when building wheels... but at least try to apply the concept, even if only plucking spokes when eyeballing radial runout. that would be rough estimations (intuition) but it's better than nothing. meaning you would still get fairly sloppy work most of the time as you can only get the best results if you are able to measure both (in order to use a spreadsheet etc.) and apply the elastic modulus so that eventually you compute how many degrees you need to turn each nipple to fine tune the wheel - 0.45mm is the usual spoke thread pitch. as you approach maximum spoke tension whenever you turn a nipple the spoke stretches much more than the rim is approaching the rim at a tight arc. so keep in mind to do the precise radial adjustments at medium DS tension with almost slack NDS spokes. if you don't rush this and do it properly then you won't need to work with DS spokes but just build tension in stages by tightening the NDS spokes alone. on non disc front wheels it's a bit more simple as you don't need to figure out the dishing which should be done before adjusting radial runout with tension variance at that medium DS tension.

tendency

I dunno about any of this. I can say, having worked with one of the finest wheelbuilders in the midwest (IMHO), he doesnt care about any of this. Huh.

thook

OP....asks for the cereal box to read over morning breakfast. gets collegiate discourse on the proprietary chemical nature of wheaties' sugar flake coating

cyccommute 

About 3.5 times thinner. Honestly, 0.05mm is human hair thickness. I dare you to do that with a truing stand.

3alarmer 

...pretty much. By those standards all my work is sloppy, but I've been very lucky. Proof yet again it is better to be lucky than smart.

deacon mark

I use this one I paid about $100 new years ago and it is great. It is sturdy and I clamp it down on my bench ( I repair guitars for a living) and I add some rulers on the other side and underneath the wheel to give pretty precise readings. I have built wheels with it many times and I think the best bang for the buck.
TS-8 Home Mechanic Wheel Truing Stand | Park Tool

adipe

"best bang for the buck" is using zip ties, a proper spoke key (which should cost a tenner or so) and a trained ear (any ear can be trained) and THEN spending some time to do your research with regards to wheel building. and if you want to invest some more money then just get yourself a laser leveling tool and use your brain a bit. as for getting by without a tension meter you need a bit more research to understand how to translate from sound (Hz) to kgf for the spoke linear density and vibrating distance (from the cross to the nipple). google tone generator.

invest in a proper truing stand - with dials - if you expect to work for hundreds of hours on wheels. if not then better spend your resources on other things, truing stands with no dials are not really worth the money. i mean do you expect to use a crappy truing stand for 20...50 hours in the next 5 years? if you expect to have less than 20 hours of work then a crappy truing stand is just crap. why not trust someone who has better tools? is it because tools are not everything? then what you should really do - if you really want to do a good work - is to find a cheaper AND BETTER alternative to a crappy (no dials) truing stand so you can do a better job WITH MEASUREMENTS done at the rim and spoke tension for each spoke. that is because it takes too much time to achieve zero radial runout - in which case you still need to take into account spoke tension variance after that zero radial runout is achieved so that you turn back from that zero radial runout because it does not make sense to have zero radial runout unless spoke tension variance is nil.

if you still don't understand the importance for the dials on a proper truing stand then you should give up building/repairing wheels.

Pop N Wood

I cut two pieces of angle iron from an old bedframe, notched the ends and bolted them to a scrap 2x6. The angle iron flexes enough it holds anything from my 126 mm QR rear wheel to the 142 mm through axle wheels.

The trick is a flexible LED light illuminating a magnetic pointer positioned near the rim. Need the light hitting the pointer from the side and projecting onto the rim. If the length of the shadow stays the same then the wheel is true.

I do have an expensive spoke tension meter to get the tension right. But once tensioned I pluck the spokes and tune them by ear to get them all uniform.

Won't win many wienie measuring contests like we have here but when used right does a damn fine job truing wheels.

3alarmer 

...whoa. Sweet Jesus. Cleanup on aisle four.

cyccommute 

Human hair precision with zip ties????!!!! And how do you use a laser level in wheel building? And, again, millions...perhaps billions... of wheels have been built over the last 125 years without tension meters. Somehow people survived your so called “sloppy building”.


A wheel can be built with a frame...I seem to recall you doing exactly that. No dial indicators are really needed. They might be nice but, honestly, they aren’t really necessary to make a serviceable wheel that will last for thousands of miles. Thousands...perhaps millions...of people have built wheels without them.

Again, how many wheels have you built? Have you tracked each one to determine how long they last? Have you kept detailed records of the build and the data as well as varied parameters to see if all this folderol you keep going on about is necessary?

At this point all your wall of overkill is doing is confusing everyone, especially newbie wheel builders.

fishboat

Musson stand, $15