30-minute truing stand

[johnridley]

Only has a gauge for side-to-side jog, need to come up with one for hop.
I just walked into the shop and built this out of whatever I could find at hand. It works pretty well. Not adjustable for axle length, but I only have the one bike. Besides, I could make one of these for a half dozen axle lengths and still be cheaper than the cheapest commercial unit.

I did make a dishing tool, but while I was using this, I realized I could get the same thing by just flipping the wheel around and seeing if the rim was as far from the measuring stick that way, so I never used the tool.

Comments

[ex-erikvolso370.livejournal.com]

A good start.

The biggest risk -- that the axle points aren't square. Best way to fix this is to have indicators on both sides.

You'll want screw threads to position the indicators.

Yes, you can flip the wheel to get dish correct, but dish sticks are easier (esp. right after lacing the wheel up) and self centering stands are easier yet (though they aren't accurate enough to use without flipping or a dish stick, they make the inital dish trivial.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

The indicator on the right there is a piece of threaded rod through a union nut.
I'm trying to envision how having the points not square would be helped by having indicators on both sides. If they're not square, it's just going to offset the position of the bottom of the wheel. If the two sides are independent as they are in this design, there would be no way to know even if there is a lack of squareness.

The ease of a dish stick would have to be countered against the irritation of the dog jumping over me while I'm sitting on the living room floor, truing a wheel while watching TV, and giving the dog one more thing to trip over and the cats one more thing to sniff.

I made this dish stick out of some hardboard scraps, it is OK but a little awkward. Next time I get somewhere to buy some more steel stock, I'll try to remember to grab some stock to weld up a proper dish stick.

But what I really need is a hop indicator; that's the only problem with the current wheel. I made too many iterations in getting things to where I liked them, so I wound up with some wheel hop. It's hard to correct without an indicator. All I had on this one was to put my thumb between the wheel and the stand, and feel for where the wheel hit my thumb, then try to flatten that out. It's acceptable but not great; probably 1/16" total peak-to-peak hop.