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Hi I do pretty much all of our own maintenance but one thing I have not mastered or really tried is truing wheels, normally send to LBS, would like to learn and have a go myself.
What do people suggest jig or just on bike by eye etc, any books to read or videos to watch.
Thanks in advance.
You don’t need a fancy jig, just a decent spoke key, some cable ties and know what you’re doing - a jig just makes the job a bit easier. Plenty of online guides/YouTube - the knack is being methodical/little and often rather than giving each nipple a full turn and seeing what happens - as you get nearer to true, adjustments get smaller and smaller. Use your frame and forks in a stand, or even turn the bike upside-down. True for radial first and then side-to-side. Sometime if dealing with an unfamiliar wheel, it’s easier to wind-off the tension and start afresh with slack spokes and you can check whether the rim is true/non-distorted.
Surprisingly it’s not as hard as you might think, as dovebiker says you just need to be methodical and make small incremental adjustments.
I bent a wheel last year and decided to have a go at fixing it myself, can’t remember which online guide I used but this one from Park looks useful:
https://www.parktool.com/blog/repair-help/wheel-and-rim-truing
Don’t bother with a jig. I put my bike in a stand, tied the bars off so the wheel/fork wouldn’t move, and used a combination of pencils and zip ties to help see the bends. I probably didn’t get it 100% true, but close enough that I’ve never noticed it while riding.
The one thing I always try to remember is that spokes do not tighten themselves in use, so start off looking for loose(r) spokes rather than randomly winding tension off. Roger Musson's online - paid-for - wheel-building book is probably more than you need, but covers stuff like this in passing. You can quite often spot differences in spoke tension by the tone it makes if you pluck it with a finger nail.
I find it much easier using a jig but YMMV.
Practice on an old wheel first.
Slack off all the spokes, read some of the online guides, YouTube vids etc, then have a go at it. Very satisfying feeling to get it spinning nicely. No jig required, just in the frame or forks will do you.
I actually disagree about using an old well.
I would recommend building one from scratch!
Too much digging involved? And it can get very wet!
Building a new wheel from scratch so you know where you're starting from and the rim is straight to begin with is a good place to start. As said above, with patience (and I'd highly reccomend the Roger Musson book) it's quite straightforward.
Once you know what you're doing from that, THEN approach true-ing a wheel.
With the bike in a stand with the tyre off, I used to put some tape across the seatstays so you can put pen marks on, putting the wheel in the wrong then the right way to centralise the marks and if the tape is close enough to the rim you can check radial as well, but then I built my own jigs.