It looks like I’ve got some wheel building to do. I’ve always used feel and experience to establish wheel tension, and never had a problem. I thought I might give a tensiometer a try if I could find one inexpensively.
Let me know if you have something you no longer need either because of an upgrade or maybe your wheel is so solid you don’t ever imagine needing it again.
Thanks for looking.
For some reason spoke tension meter and inexpensive don’t seem to go well together.
I find this strange, if we compare that to the price of an iPhone.
I’ve seen anything between the usual $/€ 250 and up to even more than 2K for digital ones.
You must have seen the the Park Tools M2 already, I guess;
If you happen to find something better please let me know.
Inexpensive is a relative term, so in this case it might be a Park or Wheelsmith for $30-40, or a Hozan for $200. I’m hoping for something in the first category. Of course I can buy a new Park for $60.
There are a couple of new Park TM-1s on eBay for $55 shipped.
I’ve built four wheels using my Park meter and will be building three more soon. I find having the meter makes tensioning/truing go much faster as I’m not constantly second guessing things. If I had more experience building wheels without a meter this might not have been an issue.
There are a couple of new Park TM-1s on eBay for $55 shipped.
I’ve built four wheels using my Park meter and will be building three more soon. I find having the meter makes tensioning/truing go much faster as I’m not constantly second guessing things. If I had more experience building wheels without a meter this might not have been an issue.
At my current level of skill I use the meter to check relative spoke tension and rarely care about absolute KgF values so the accuracy of the meter isn’t really important to me as long as it’s consistent while I’m using it.
+1 for the Park tension meter. Its a simple device with a well designed easy to read numerical scale and I generally use it to check my work towards the end of a build. The Park Tool laminated chart that shows the range of values is easy to use and simple.
For what its worth, I’ve borrowed a Hozan tensioner before and it worked fine as well, but I just like the Park tool better.
Brycer
It’s looking like I’ll probably go with a new Park. I have been building wheels for over 3 decades, and I honestly don’t have a clue about how many hundreds I have built in that time. I have always trusted my experience, and I’ve never had any problems with my wheels losing true, and I’ve never had any complaints about the work I’ve done for customers and friends.
The tension meter is more of a curiosity for me than a necessity. What I’m interested in is whether or not the wheels built with it will be even just a bit stronger. Something that is hard to quantify.
The upside is that it should be easy enough to sell a used one if I decide it was a fruitless experiment.
I ordered the park tool today. I wonder how much time it will add to my builds. I should find out next week.
That’s exactly how I felt except replace 3 decades with one and hundreds to dozens. I ended up getting a park TM-1 with a bunch of other stuff I got from a guy and have been using it since. While it is not essential for a good build it is incredibly handy when you are building with different sized spokes or rim than you are used to.
I think there is a reason you don’t see too many used ones for sale, and it’s not because they are all getting broken. Good luck with the new toy.
I bet you’re right about the thin used market. I worked in a shop for over ten years, and built the majority of my wheels there. When Wheelsmith started up I don’t remember too many people taking their tension meter seriously, but here we are now.
What is your workflow with the meter? I imagine that I will tension and dish like normal, then use the meter to spot check tension as the wheel comes close to the end. This sounds like it may be what Bryce does as well. There’s always plucking to equalize tension once you have a known value.
Yup, that is basically what I do. I mostly use it to know what my average tension is. I had a real hard time judging how tight the spokes were on my trials wheel before the gage since all my previous experience had been with 26" and 700C wheels.
I use it more extensively if I am doing something funky like a mismatched build with varying spoke lengths.
Basically it’s a confidence booster.
And what tension do you adjust your spokes too?
Greetings
Byc