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Warning: I blew $220 on a Park Tool wheel truing stand before I learned to build wheels on a $40 fork jig
Bought the fancy stand at a swap in Austin because everyone online said you need one, then a retired shop guy showed me his setup, an old fork bolted to a bench vice with a zip tie as an indicator. He's built maybe 300 wheels that way and they're straighter than mine. What's your no-money trick that actually works better than the tool everyone tells you to buy?
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the_wren11d ago
Learned this the hard way after years of chasing tools, the real trick is that the stand is only as good as your reference point. A truing stand holds the axle at two fixed points, but your frame holds the wheel at the dropouts, and those are never perfectly in line with each other. So you can get a wheel dead straight in a stand and it still rubs the brake pads when you bolt it in, because the frame itself is a little off. The fork jig beats the fancy stand for one simple reason, you are building the wheel in the same crooked world it has to live in. That retired guy was not being cheap, he was being smart.
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