Finally got around to building the wheels. Simply followed the directions in Roger Musson's book (see prior post) and all has gone well. Of course, the real test won't occur until I get the rest of the bike built. I don't have a frame that fits 26" wheels to test!
To build the wheels, I borrowed a truing stand from a friend, which was rather convenient. I built my own dishing gage out of plywood as I wasn't confident that the truing stand was really getting the dish correct.
I didn't use anything to measure spoke tension during building - I simply tightened the spokes until what I think is pretty darn tight. The only thing different that I've done from Roger Musson's suggestions is that I used an ordinary dining spoon to tap on the spokes to check the tone (rather than "plucking" with a finger). As Roger said - it's not used to decide whether the spokes are tight enough, but its to check that the spokes are tightened evenly around. I found this quite useful to do a number of times during the tightening process.
It's convenient that I only have 2 sizes of spokes for both wheels. That's a nice advantage to the Shimano XT M8000 disk brake hubs on 26 inch rims. Not sure if that would hold true on larger rims.
