Trueing a laced wheel

Any suggestions on trueing up a laced spoke wheel? It has little hop to it and I'd like to try and fix the issue myself.

In the last month or two, Motorcycle Consumer News had an article on lacing and trueing wheels. You might see if it can be found online. I've seen other basic tutorials online, so I'm sure you can find one.

Basically you need a way to measure the deviation of the wheel either side-to-side or up and down relative to the axle. This can be done with greater accuracy using a dial micrometer or less accurately but still effectively by eyeballing it with something as simple as a pointer set up at the edge of the rim. Whatever you measure with needs to be set up (as does the wheel) to assure that once everything is set, nothing moves except for the wheel spinning on the axle.

I got a "dial mic" and a magnetic base at Harbor Frieght. It will stick to the fork tubes so I can do trueing on the bike which helps since the forks and axle can keep the wheel hub in a single position. Many cycle shops sell spoke wrenches... the most common being from Rowe Industries (about $5-10).

Take your time and make small adjustments. Don't try to get the entire correction done on a single spoke or even set of spokes. Most wheels have spokes in groups of four and they all should share a certain degree of the adjustment... maybe even into the adjacent sets of spokes. Particularly if you are adjusting the rim up or down, relative to the axle, you also need to adjust accordingly on the opposite side of the wheel... tighten on the lower side and loosen on the top side, for example.

Oh yeah!.... use a penetrating lubricant liberally before you start. Once spoke nipples have been in place for a long time, they don't give up their position easily.

+1 to everything CC said. It takes a little patience, though; truing a wheel is as much art as science. One other thing to pay attention to, in addition to the up and down and side to side, is the spoke tension. You want to check this before and after, and make sure you don't end up with any spokes that are over-stressed after truing. One way to check it is to go around the wheel and pluck each one like a guitar string, and you can pretty much tell by the pitch if one or more are tighter (or looser) than the rest.

So maybe it should be called tuning instead of truing I lightly tap them with a wrench or screwdriver, just letting the weight of the tool make the impact from very close while the wheel spins slowly. The key is for each impact to be like the last in intensity. Like Greg says, you'll hear any that are too tight or loose relative to the rest.

My Kx's front wheel was off after the last couple of rides, used a pencil to mark the deviations and torqued/untorqued 180 out at first making the problem worse then corrected and trued it to about 90%. Since I had to wrench the spokes twice, rounded off a few strategic adjustments. The bike handled fine though.