I'm not in any particular hurry with the wheel I am building, so I'm free to experiment. Last night I downloaded the Park Tool spoke tension mapping spreadsheet and charted my wheel. The wheel was true, round, and stress relieved.
This is for a rear wheel: the red represents the higher tension drive side spokes; the blue the NDS. An evenly tensioned wheel will be round on this graph, devoid of peaks and valleys. This actually looks pretty good, but the spoke tension needs to be increased by 10%.
I busted out the spoke wrench and started tightening the drive side spokes. Slowly. 1/8 a turn until the desired tension was reached. At this spoke tension is can be easy to strip a spoke nipple whether it is aluminum or brass.
With the ideal spoke tension reached on the DS, I moved to the NDS and started by correcting the dish of the wheel. Once the wheel was true and dished I graphed the spoke tension once again.
The DS spoke tension is now uniformly 125 Kgf. That should be balanced by an ideal NDS tension of 50 Kgf. I haven't adjusted the radial trueness and you can see that on the graph: the #3 spoke reads low (a high spot on the rim); and the #9 reads high (a low spot on the rim). My next session with the wheel will balance the DS spoke tension and correct the radial true. Then this wheel will be done.
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| Miss this step and you'll look like an amateur. The hub logo shall always be aligned with the valve hole. |
