May 2026

Goal today was to true a rear wheel on my old commuter after a spoke broke mid-ride and I replaced it last weekend without finishing the job properly — dish was off, and I could feel the brake rub on every revolution.

Truing stand is a Park TS-2, which I've had long enough that I've replaced the caliper tips twice. I clipped in the wheel, zeroed the calipers against the rim, and worked through the process in order:

1. Check dish first with the dishing tool — left side was sitting about 2mm too far out. This is the thing that bites you if you go straight to lateral truing.
2. Tighten the drive-side spokes in quarter-turn increments, working in a cross-pattern, until dish came within 0.5mm.
3. Switch to lateral true. Calipers set, rotate the wheel, mark the worst wobble with a grease pencil — saves you the "which side was that?" moment.
4. Tension the opposite spoke at the wobble point, 1/8 turn. Check tension with a spoke tension meter — borrowed a cheap Pillar unit from a friend two years ago and never gave it back.
5. Stress-relieve every 15–20 minutes by pressing down on crossed spokes with both hands, steady pressure, no shortcuts.

The failure this time was my own: I'd laced the replacement spoke on the wrong cross pattern. The original wheel is 3-cross, and I built the new spoke as 2-cross because I wasn't paying attention when I threaded it. That's why dish wouldn't fully settle no matter how much I wound the nipple — the spoke was running at the wrong angle and pulling slightly off-axis. I caught it by holding the wheel up to the light and counting crosses manually. Fixed it by removing the spoke, re-lacing correctly, and starting over. Lost about 40 minutes.

End result is within 0.3mm lateral and 0.4mm radial, which is fine for a commuter. Brake rub is gone.

Next time I'd mark the cross count on a piece of tape stuck to the rim before pulling the broken spoke, so I'm not reconstructing the lace pattern from a half-disassembled wheel.

#workshop #bikemechanic #wheelbuilding #diy

Goal today: true the rear wheel on my commuter, a 700c rim that's been pulling about 2mm out of true near the 5 o'clock position for three weeks. Not dangerous, but the brake pad was kissing the rim on hard stops, and the wheel does about 80 miles a week, so ignoring it felt less and less like a plan.

Procedure:

1. Mounted the wheel in the truing stand, marked the high spot with a dry-erase marker on the rim sidewall.
2. Identified the offending spokes — three drive-side and two non-drive-side in the affected zone.
3. Checked spoke tension with a Park TM-1 before touching anything. Drive-side averaged around 110 kgf, non-drive closer to 65 kgf. The lateral deviation was coming from loose non-drive spokes, not overtightened drive-side ones.
4. Made quarter-turn adjustments on the non-drive spokes, alternating between the two, checking lateral true after each round.
5. Checked dish with the stand's built-in gauge. Off by about 0.5mm toward the non-drive side after my corrections.
6. Corrected by tightening the drive-side spokes in the same zone by an eighth turn each.

The failure: after I was satisfied with the lateral, I mounted the wheel and found a 1mm radial hop I'd introduced somewhere in steps 4 and 5. I'd been checking lateral true only, treating radial as a final-pass item. The cause was probably my grip on the spoke wrench — I use a short-reach Spokey, and on tighter spokes I tend to overrotate slightly when my wrist runs out of travel. That compounded over six or seven rounds before I caught it.

Correcting the hop took another twenty minutes. Fine for a once-a-week repair, but annoying when it was self-inflicted.

Next time: check both lateral and radial every other round, not just at the end. One more check per cycle adds five minutes and catches this before it compounds into rework.

#workshop #bikemechanic #wheelbuilding #truing