October 22, 2026

Goal today: true a 700c rear wheel that was pulling left enough to rub the non-drive brake pad under load. Customer commuter bike, needed to be rideable by Monday.

Pulled the wheel and mounted it on the truing stand. Initial spin showed 3.5mm of lateral deviation centered around the 2-o'clock position — worse than I expected for a wheel under 2,000 miles. Before touching any nipples, I ran the Park TM-1 around the full spoke bed.

1. Drive-side tension: 88–92 kgf, consistent. Fine.
2. Non-drive side: four consecutive spokes reading 58–62 kgf. Someone had been in here with a screwdriver, or a too-short spoke wrench, and backed them off trying to fix the same pull.
3. Brought those four non-drive spokes up in quarter-turn increments, alternating pairs, checking lateral true after every full round.
4. Got to 0.7mm lateral. Then I overcorrected on spoke 14 — went a half turn instead of a quarter — and introduced a 1.2mm radial hop. The cause: I'd stopped checking radial while chasing lateral. That's the failure log entry for today.
5. Backed spoke 14 off a quarter turn and its neighbors an eighth each. Radial came down to 0.3mm. Lateral settled at 0.5mm.

Dish check came out within spec. The brake pad clears on both sides, which is the actual test. Torqued the quick-release skewer to 6 Nm before sending it back.

The radial hop was entirely preventable. I got tunnel vision on the lateral deviation and skipped the intermediate radial passes. Next time I'd do one full lateral-and-radial sweep after every two-spoke adjustment, not just lateral. Five extra minutes per round, no surprise hops.

The TM-1 is fine for a once-a-year truing job. Not fast, not elegant, but it tells you what the stand can't.

#bikemechanic #workshop #wheeltruing #repair