Wasted $85 on a cheap spoke tension meter that threw off my whole build

I bought a no-name spoke tension meter off Amazon last month to save money on a wheel build, but it gave me false readings on every spoke. After the wheel went completely out of true on my first ride, I checked it against a shop's Park Tool TM-1 and the thing was off by almost 20% on half the spokes. Has anyone else gotten burned by cheap tension tools that just aren't accurate enough for building reliable wheels?

2 comments

2 Comments

theawest7d ago

Yeah, the "off by almost 20%" part hits home. I had a cheap meter that was basically a random number generator, and I ended up with a wheel that looked fine on the stand but wobbled like crazy under load. Took me way too long to figure out the tool was trash, not my building skills. My advice is either borrow a shop's TM-1 or just learn the old school way with a spoke nipple driver and your ears, because a bad tension reading will wreck your whole day. At least now you know the cheap ones are good for nothing but stressing you out and wasting your time.

wade5586d ago

Think about this though, the tension meter being off isn't just about the reading being wrong. It's that cheap meters will drift over time as the battery gets low or the temperature changes, so your first wheel might come out fine and the next one is a disaster. I had one where the spring loaded mechanism itself would stick on certain spokes, then release suddenly giving me a false high reading. Ended up with a wheel where half the spokes were at like 80 kgf and the other half at 130, but the meter said they were all close. The wheel was a literal potato.