Before you do anything you should find a way to check your tension. Occam’s razor would lead me to believe that low tension is what’s causing the loosening.
If you loosen your spokes to push down the j-bend, you’re left needing to retension the wheel anyway. The j-bends will also pull themselves flat over time (and require a retension when that happens since the spoke is getting longer).
Putting loctite on your spokes because you don’t have a tension meter is like stitching up a small cut in your own arm because you don’t have a band aid.
Take the wheel to a shop, use your phone with a guitar tuner app, or spring for a tm-1 (which is not an expensive tool considering how much easier it will make life).
I totally agree - there is no way you should be having to use something to stop the nipples unscrewing if the wheel is properly tensioned. My anecdotal experience is that the very first set of bike wheels I built myself I had to stop to tighten the spokes on the first ride as they’d come completely loose. I’ve built wheels with a lot more tension since then and not had a problem again.
Check here for advice on checking tension by pitch:
You’re spoke length will be longer than the longest in that table, so you’ll need to do a bit of adjustment. In theory tone is inversely proportional to length, but the effective length of the spoke which is vibrating and generating the tone is less than the whole length of the spoke as the ends are held rigid.
In order to get the correct tone for your spokes, divide your spoke length by 2 and add 10mm - check the tone for that length in the table and that’s the tone you should be aiming for (but an octave lower as your spokes are effectively twice as long).
Or if that’s all too confusing, tell me your spoke length and I’ll give you the tone/frequency you should be aiming for.
For the past while I’ve just been tightening the odd spoke on the road. Over time the wheel has gone out of true. I’m going to allocate some time to doing a full job on the spokes and trueing the wheel.
Also there are some new spokes in the wheel which I didn’t pre-stress as suggested by BungeeJoe.
Maybe I’ll pass on the red Loctite. Although I’m still curiously tempted.
