Hoodoo

With a lot of peer pressure from Johnnie I've been dabbling in the dark arts. Apparently wheel building is not as hard as generally advertised and not as mystical as some believe. So with not a little trepidation I ordered the component parts, hung up some talisman charms, shuffled my tarot cards (kept getting "the fool") sacrificed a chicken (before Johnnie arrived, I doubt he'd approve) and got started. Lacing it all up was pretty easy and I managed to get a little tension in the spokes without dragging the rim severely out of true. With the loan of a jig and some supervision I managed to get the dish something approaching right and trued up the wheel, spoke tension still a bit all over the place but hey ho. Since then I've done a bit more fettling, tried to get the spokes to similar tension and corrected the true. I'm pretty happy with it now, in the jig you can see little wobbles up/down and side to side but hold it in your hands and spin it it looks bob on. I just need to ride on it now and see if it collapses or springs out of true at the first hint of a rock.

I did wonder mid-build how advisable it was to build my first wheel for use on the back of my heckler, the rim dinger, tube shredder, destroyer of tyres etc etc. Time will tell. Oh yeah and more non ust tubeless shenanigans to look forward to.