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Watched an old guy true a wheel with a spoke wrench and a flip phone at the Kentucky swap meet
Was at the big bike swap in Louisville back in March, just digging through bins of old derailleurs, when I noticed this older fella set up on a folding chair with a beat up wheel in his lap. No truing stand, no dish tool, nothing. He had one spoke wrench and a flip phone open to a tone generator app, and he was plucking spokes and listening. I stood there probably ten minutes watching him work, and he got that rim within a millimeter just by ear. I asked him about it and he said he'd been building wheels since 1974 and his stand got stolen off his truck in 2009, so he just never bought another one. Tried it myself on a junk rim in the shop a few days later and honestly I got closer than I expected in about twenty minutes. Anyone else here tune wheels by sound, or am I about to waste a lot of time learning a party trick?
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matthewgonzalez12d ago
Tuning by sound isn't a party trick, it's how the old timers did it before stands were cheap. I've got a Park stand in the shop but I still pluck and listen when I'm sneaking up on the last bit of wobble, because your ear catches stuff your eyes miss on a spinning rim. The flip phone tone app thing is clever but you don't even need it, you can hear the pitch go up as you add tension and match it across the wheel. Where I'd push back is the "within a millimeter" part, because by ear alone you're usually chasing round and side to side at the same time and it's easy to fool yourself. Learn it if you want, it'll make you faster, just don't toss the stand in the dumpster.
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