>
> Well, this might be a red herring, but there's a really excellent book
> on building *bicycle* wheels: The Bicycle Wheel, by Jobst Brandt. My
> guess is that the numbers will be all wrong, but the theory will still
> apply. (I have disc wheels, and I've worked on bicycle wheels enough to
> believe that if I had wire wheels, I'd take them to British Wire Wheel
> and let them do the work.)
>
I've trued bicycle wheels before, it takes a long time, but anyone can do it.
When I had tried to true my automobile wheels, I found it to be a totally
different story. All of the nipples were seized to the spokes, and this
was on a set of wheels that basically had no rust. Its easy to find the
tension of any given spoke, just hit it with a metal object and listen to the
pitch that it rings at. So if you could just turn the nipples, the wheel
would be no harder to true than a bicycle wheel.
After researching the subject, and after much unsucessful work trying to
turn my wheels' nipples, I finally gave up and bought a whole new set of
wheels. If I were you, I too would send them to British Wire Wheel (I only
bought new wheels because I really wanted trick, extra wide wheels, and I
used the needed truing of my old wheels as an excuse to get the trick wheels).
Joe
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