Guitar Tuner for spoke tension measurement

[Davidc]

Damn. It does work perfectly on my guitar. You will of course alter the tension across the whole wheel with each spoke as they are so tough and a wheel is a relatively fragile thing.

I've noticed that, intuitively you think that with 36 spokes changing one won't do much to the others, but it does.

In my wheelbuilding days I could never get a trued wheel with tensions closer than about 2 tones with new rim and spokes, or about 3 tones with just new spokes. They usually stayed true for thousands of miles and without any broken spokes though. (Usually, but no wheel is immune to railway or tram lines, really bad potholing, wheelbender bike stands or the effects of attempted theft and vandalism!)

 

[Linford]

Well, with older spokes on well worn wheels, you'll get the effects of work hardening, and stress relieiving

In the business I work in, we mate tooling for extruding ally bars which are made out of very hard alloys (6082 grade) for Jumbo Jet wings stiffeners which go from wing tip to wing tip

when they get squeezed out of the press they are like an unstretched elastic band. The extruders then have to get each end of the profile in hydraulic grippers and do a tug of war which is called 'controlled stretch'. Once this is done, they are a lot less flexible in that plane, and in turn so are the wings.

The same I see will apply to older spokes.

 

[albion]

In my wheelbuilding days I could never get a trued wheel with tensions closer than about 2 tones with new rim and spokes, or about 3 tones with just new spokes. They usually stayed true for thousands of miles and without any broken spokes though. (Usually, but no wheel is immune to railway or tram lines, really bad potholing, wheelbender bike stands or the effects of attempted theft and vandalism!)

Ties in with my thoughts on wheels and I've never used a tension meter.

I'm quite certain that the engineering tolerances on RIMs are much finer for the Cavendishs of this world.
Even then it might just be a 'pick of the crop' type selection system.

 

[palinurus]

What I do is tune groups of spokes to the individual notes of some weird jazz chord, then I clip a playing card to the seatstay.

 

[Pottsy]

What I do is tune groups of spokes to the individual notes of some weird jazz chord, then I clip a playing card to the seatstay.

I was just thinking the same. You could intentionally 'tune' the wheel so that you sounded like an ice-cream van as you cycled up the road.

 

[bicyclos]

I built a pair of wheels about a month ago using a park tool spoke tension meter which was money well spent. I used tone before using a tension meter and was way out.