JonathanGennick 

I love the question in this thread. Just got done building four wheels, and found myself wishing for my 20-year old eyesight from back in the day. I go mainly by sound, but sometimes by eye because my stand is one of those one-side ones from Feedback. I don't like flipping the wheel in the stand -- a pita to do -- so I will often eyeball the lateral indicator gap once I've nailed the dish.

FWIW, I run my stand either on my office desk or the dining room table, never the floor. Better lighting helps. I have terrible lighting in the house, and sometimes rotate the stand such hat sunlight through a nearby window will backlight the indicator.

Bill Kapaun

I use the kitchen table and a chair for my butt.
Works great.

Before you obsess about "dials" etc., take your caliper and measure the distance between brake tracks of the entire rim.
Often, you'll find the rim is the limiting factor.
I bought one of the $30-35 Wheelmaster front wheels for a flip bike. The width varied .030" between min/max.
That's where the "2 finger" truing stands have an advantage. You can see if BOTH sides are touching at the same time or NOT.

wrk101

+100 By ear. Turn off the stereo. I also find a good flashlight VERY useful. Even with good lighting, when you need light in a specific spot, hard to beat a good LED flashlight.

CliffordK

What I like about my VAR PreciRay stand is that I can do both hop and lateral truing at the same time.

I.E. Identify a couple of spokes that I wish to adjust, then decide whether I wish to only tighten, tighten + loosen, or only loosen to both adjust the hop & lateral truing.

Of course, prior to this I had a pretty simple setup.

nfmisso

give me a couple of days.

nfmisso

not me; .010" on a good day.

nfmisso

The stand / dial indicator system needs to be rigid, and that whole system maybe isolated from the world, rigidly attached, or anywhere in between. You do not want to put vibration into the system that will effect the stand / dial indicator system.

AnkleWork

Now there's a mental image.

stevoo

I do the same as many forum members.
Turn down the tunes and listen for slight rub during final true and/or a sheet of white paper background as needed if you like visual reference. I use both for the last bit.
I have found that as I get older a good set of cheater glasses and a super well lit shop are really a necessity for me and makes life in the shop so much easier .
Good luck.

oldschoolbike

I go mainly by sound, like a lot of others here. But seeing is good too, and my solution is to put felt pads on the feet of my stand (a Minoura) so that I can slide it around on a smooth desktop. Better to move the stand/wheel about for best view than to contort the body. Stay comfortably seated.

Glennfordx4

I am in the middle of building a system using red LED lights, I have the prototype built & installed on my Park TS-2 and so far it works pretty good and with a simple adjustment it will work great. Sorry for the bad Phone pics.

Glenn

Glennfordx4

I started this system last yr when my vision started changing for the worst & my boss at the shop I work at was having the same issue, we are both anal when it comes to truing wheels and I want my arms of my stand to be as close as possible when I am finished and when you get to the point that it is really hard to see I turn on the leds. I was really happy with the outcome on the first try and if I bring the LED lights in just a tad it will be perfect.

Glenn

eddy m

I like the indicators shown in Roger Musson's book. They are just a straight edge held tangentially to the rim for radial run out, and another held perpendicularly for lateral. I'm getting better at using those (especially for radial truing), but I still usually use a dial for lateral truing.

One reason I like the dials is that I can record the exact position of the rim, and I can go back and re-measure it to be sure it is stable. I don't build many wheels so I like to do the whole quality control program on every one.

em

bocobiking

peterraymond

I'm not recommending them, but my wheels have bladed spokes. I adjust a crescent wrench to slip over the spoke to stop it from turning so I don't need to worry about spoke windup.

I'm far from a pro, but I adapted a dial indicator I bought from one of the places that sell discount machine tools, Like Enco, or MSC. Worked better for me, but I'm not using a real stand for truing.

I also start by equalizing the spoke tensions, That usually moves the rim closer to true.

Reynolds 531 

^ what he said.

robertorolfo

Nobody incorporates the tip of their fingers in to the mix as "feelers"?

unterhausen

I used to use sound until I got close, and then sight. Both things have gotten much worse since then. I don't want to take the plastic caps off of my TS-2.2. I wish I could get the indicators from the PK Lie stand, they are really neat.

I have never been impressed by the Park indicators. The mounting is nice, but the indicators themselves are nothing special. I never really used indicators for truing anyway. I have done some precision machining where I had to dial things in to a very tight tolerance, and for that I used indicators. I have some Noga indicator stands and SPI indicators that should work pretty well with the Park stand, but I have never really tried it.

Soil_Sampler

Gauges for me.

Myosmith

I'm about to throw a hand grenade in the outhouse, but IMHO there is no reason to worry about less than a mm or so of lateral or vertical true. One of the reasons is that it does nothing to improve wheel strength or stability. Another big reason is that there isn't a tire made within a 1 mm tolerance across the sidewalls and tred so all those nano-adjustments are lost between the rim and the ground. Finally, unless you are riding on a glass smooth surface, you will never feel the difference 1 mm (4/100 inch) of truing makes. I've watched guys obsess for hours to get a wheel down to a few 1/1000ths true with the spokes within a micro-narrow range of tension variation. All they have accomplished is to waste perfectly good riding time. I'm not saying do a sloppy job, just don't obsess about minutia that are irrelevant in the real world. Craftsmanship = YES, OCD = NO.

As far as making it easier to see. I painted my caliper tips bright green so they stand out against either black or silver rim surfaces. The other suggestions of good lighting (goose neck lamp with a soft white LED bulb is great), proper positioning of the stand relative to the craftsman's eye, and the use of reading or prescription glasses for those with less that 20/20 eyesight are all good ideas.

Andrew R Stewart 

Eric- I wish you better experience then I have had with dials. I find their jumping about to distracting. I don't tend to spin the rim slowly (as many starting mechanics do). The best indicators I've used are the VAR's. Plastic rollers follow the rim and the pointer ends magnify the run out by a factor of 3. While the pointers still hop a bit they are far more stable then a dial's needle. That these pointers are also on the more solif stand helps. Andy

Andrew R Stewart 

No explosion here. My post 9 says as much, although I neglected to mention that other aspect of a wheel system, the road surface. Good point there. Andy

unterhausen

Back when I was working as a mechanic, I built a wheel for a shop I didn't work for. I forget what stand they had, but the only pointer was a dial indicator. It just about drove me nuts. Wheel came out okay and they offered to hire me, so I did get it to work. I never really understood the need for that much accuracy. I'm pretty sure the wheel would have been just as close on a stock TS-2. Park didn't sell indicators back then

The PK Lie indicators are scaled so that they don't jump around too much. One of their youtube videos implies that an unskilled worker can true a wheel with their stand. It's an interesting approach.

Nowadays I build to equal tension and then do a final touch up with the stand pointers. That's why my stand design relies on indicators. I don't true wheels very often, but I use tension for that too. Of course, for a lot of wheels that would never work, but fortunately I don't have to work on those wheels

notwomamils

I was really lucky to find an HTK truing stand - very similar to the hozan. 30+pounds of cast iron. The original build tolerances weren't great but the indicators are threaded bolts with knurled ends. I replaced these with bolts holding brackets attached to dial gauges. It needs a sturdy bench to work on but there is 0 movement of the guages do to vibration or anything other than the rim.

Andrew R Stewart 

My first stand was a HKZ. Threaded hollow axle holders and threaded rim lateral "points". I built quite a few wheels on it including a couple of motorcycle ones (Honda CB 500 IIRC). I inadvertently left it behind in an apartment basement I had rented for a couple of months, too much brain "food" back then It took a while, after I remembered it's being left behind, to get past it's loss. The VAR helped. Now I wish I had it for a relic on a shelf (like a couple of bike's I have bought to relive my past) Andy