May 20, 2026

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