Finally got my first wheel true within 0.2mm after months of struggling with a spoke tension meter

Spent 3 hours on a used Mavic rim from a 2012 Trek I picked up at a swap meet in Denver and got it within half a millimeter of true both laterally and radially, anybody else find that old Mavic rims are way easier to work with than the modern aero stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

phoenix_adams601mo ago

0.2mm is impressive on paper, but I gotta ask, how are you actually measuring that? The cheap calipers most of us use flex if you look at them wrong, and a painted rim can throw off readings. Plus, half a millimeter radial and lateral on a used rim is honestly the easy part. The real test is if the spoke tension is even across the whole wheel, not just what the dial says on one spot. You'd probably get the same result with a $60 Amazon truing stand as you would with a $400 Park Tool, so I'm not sure months of struggling says more about the rim than your setup.

wright.jesse1mo ago

Exactly, I ran into the same thing with my last wheel build. My $60 dial indicator setup reads spot on until you put actual weight on the tire, then the whole thing shifts a hair. And honestly, checking tension with a cheap spoke wrench and my thumb just tells me if it's close, not if it's perfect. The even tension part is where I spent an extra week, and I still doubt it's as balanced as a shop's tensiometer would say. Months of fighting a used rim usually means the rim is fine and the tooling is the real bottleneck.