Does anyone have or use a Jobst Brandt style spoke tensiometer?
I know in the past that FSA and Avocet have made these. Currently Wheel Fanatyk make one currently. As I found out recently, so does a chap called Filip in Macedonia.
His design offers an option of a linear bearing on the slider and a choice of analogue or digital gauge.
Just wondering if anyone one has experience or thoughts on this type of tool?
I'm sure plenty will point out that a tensiometer isn't needed but that's not the question. I like working with nice tools but just pondering how nice to go.
Let me start with the comment you don't want.
I think they are a total waste of time.
They just need to be right ball park and the park one does that just grand, as does pinging them to check they are relatively even.
Sticking a gauge on one is just daft, i have a truing stand with them and i ignore them and listen to the feeler hitting.
Its just making a not hard job very very tedious.
And as soon as you have any kind of damage you tension will be a compromise anyway.
I don't have a musical ear so never been a fan of plucking spokes.
I have a park tool TM-1 but find that it can be inconsistent if you remeasure the same spoke several times.
I've also had shop built wheels that measured up as 20% tolerance. Those went out of true pretty quickly in the wife's commuter. I like wheels with the tightest tolerance I can get.
I get that there are limitations. After all if the dial reads 0.01mm increments and 0.05mm represents 100kgf to 120kgf, then each graduation is 4kgf. You could maybe argue that you can read between graduations on a dial.but that's still 2kgf.
I use a basic cheap tension meter, there's loads out there that are basically a rip off of the Park tools one, I don't exactly trust the accuracy of the actual kgf though, but I can tell how tight I want the spokes by a quick squeeze, I just use it to get them as evenly tensioned as possible, you can always check iit against a built wheel to see where the reading should be, it's surprising how off the tensions can be on wheelsets fresh out of the box, NSbikes for example, readings all over the place, some spokes well over tightened and hardly moved with a good squeeze.
I don't know if the new forum embeds YouTube links yet, but bikes with mike did a shoot out of different tension meters that was quite interesting.
Yes, I have made one of the same design as a fun project. As others have said plucking the spokes gets them to an even tension ( I'm not musical either). But the tensiometer allows inexperienced builders ( like me) to understand what tension the wheel is at. But more importantly it's a fun engineering project. I really could not justify buying one though..
There you go then - https://wheelfanatyk.com/products/wheel-fanatyk-tensiometers guess if you build a lot of wheels it's worth the money! But then again if you build a lot of wheels, do you need it?!
I bought a cheap one and it's very inconsistent - however to compare tension with another wheel, it's fine. Might order one of those Ali Express digi ones though, just for the hell of it 🙂
I bought the AliExpress one. It's really nice quality with a bearing on the pivot point. Well impressed.
