Somewhere along the line I must have changed…
There was a time when I considered truing a wheel an exercise in pure frustration. I would take the offending wheel to the local bike shop (LBS) and have them do it, even if it was what they considered a quick and easy job of truing. I did try a number of times, either because the LBS was closed or I was desperate to save a couple bucks. Each time I ended up cursing as I started chasing an out of true spot round and round the rim. Too often the wheel ended up more out of true when I finished than when I started.
It turned out that one of the flats the other day was from a split in the plastic snap-in rim tape (I never should have moved away from cloth tape!). The spoke nipple punctured the tube in the high heat and excessive load (me, still 30lbs over weight) on the bike. Time to replace rim tape, tires and tubes. Since they were stripped down anyways I took the time to true the wheels as well.
Somehow now truing the wheel was like some weird zen meditation. Slowly eliminating the thwack, thwacka, thwack scrape against the feelers of my truing stand a little at a time until at last there was no more scrape laterally or radially. Not to say it’s a perfect true, but real close. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is, except now that I am older and have a decade of marriage and six years as a father I expect I have far more patience. Tammy thinks it may be because I have become more spiritual and more prone to “slow down and smell the roses”.
It could also be the fact that I really need to save the money of having the LBS true my wheels so I can replace the cassette, chain rings, chain and cables. The rings and cogs are all showing extreme wear and the cable stretch has gotten severe enough that I need to adjust them almost daily to ensure clean shifts. I am looking at the Nokon Shift Cables (Shimano road type) as I have seen some good reviews of them for mountain bikes, but have not seen any reviews for road bikes.
Anyone using them on a road bike? Got an opinion?
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