Year or two ago our neighbor was packing to move across town and put a Park Tools truing stand out on the sidewalk for pickup. I texted him (first picked it up and brought it inside) if he knew what he was giving away. Cause these things aint cheap and I've been intentionally not buying one for years because it's not _really_ necessary to build a wheel. He said yeah of course, it was his FIL's and he just would never use it so was happy I would.
I tried coming up with an excuse to build a wheel several times since then; but going through the trouble of finding all the right matching hub-spoke-rim-nipple combo just because I wanted to use a tool seemed... i dunno, stupid? When I picked up the Homer though, I had a front wheel I'd bought used off the the Riv forum (itself an absolute impulse at the time because the price was pretty good) so at last had a reason to build a specific rear wheel to match.
For the wheel, I got a Rivendell New S!lver 135 mm hub, a Velocity Atlas 36h rim, and some DT Swiss spokes. I went for splurging on the spokes for the "competition" level that has butting of 1.8mm to 2.0mm. To calculate the lengths, used the wonderful free tool from https://www.kstoerz.com/freespoke/ (293mm for left flange, 288 for right).
It's been a while since my last attempt so I had to follow the Sheldon Brown instructions very closely again for the 3 cross pattern. I think I misunderstood the 'handedness' discussion. This rim seemed to be lefthanded and I didn't get the key spoke quite right. You can see when the valve stem comes out, it isn't in the "parallel orthogonal" (my term) section of the pattern, but it's one to the left (CCW from drive side) where the spokes are mostly orthogonal and mostly parallel. That aside, I got the whole thing mostly assembled in one night after putting Jonny down to sleep.
After the loose assembly, I did the John Allen trick of light tap with claw hammer to bend the spokes every so slightly against the flanges. Then came the true test of my wheelbuilding skills. Because once you've have the spokes in, there's quite an art to getting the wheel trued side to side and vertically and doing it all with good spoke tension. I've built maybe 3? 4? other wheels in the past and at this point I've always gotten close but then taken it to my boy Gilbert from Helen's that enjoys truing wheels on the side as his little zen hobby. But with the truing stand I gritted my teeth and just keep at it for the night. I found, though, after some time I was messing up which way to spin the spoke wrench to tighten or loosen and realized it was time to give up for the night.
Day 2, during my lunch break I went back at it. I'm not sure if this is the 'proper' way amongst actual wheelbuilders, but I found iterating between left-right then vertical to be slow but persistently towards a fully correct wheel. After it was as close as I thought I could get, I used my new spoke tension meter to compare both sides. With those numbers I went back one more time to try to narrow the standard deviation on each flange. In the end the tensions were measured as suchly:
| Spoke # (CW facing drive side) | Left flange | Right flange |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20 | 23 |
| 2 | 20 | 25 |
| 3 | 17.5 | 23.5 |
| 4 | 19 | 25 |
| 5 | 19.5 | 22.5 |
| 6 | 18.5 | 24.5 |
| 7 | 19 | 23 |
| 8 | 20 | 24 |
| 9 | 17 | 24 |
| 10 | 20 | 23.5 |
| 11 | 17 | 24.5 |
| 12 | 20 | 22 |
| 13 | 17.5 | 24.5 |
| 14 | 19 | 24 |
| 15 | 18.5 | 24 |
| 16 | 18.5 | 24 |
| 17 | 20 | 24 |
| 18 | 17 | 24.5 |
| average | 18.8 | 23.9 |
| std dev | 1.2 | 0.8 |
| +10% | 20.7 | |
| -10% | 16.9 |
I cannot definitively say how much I should brag about those numbers, but I can say for sure when I brought the wheel to my bike shop to ask if they can check the dishing (a tool I didn't feel like getting), it was nearly perfect.
So that was it really. I have no idea if true wheel builders have any last final touches before they deem it complete. I'm just happy I got through the whole thing on my own for a first.