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Pulled 40 stripped spoke nipples out of one wheel last Tuesday and it finally clicked why I stopped using power tools on builds
So I do a lot of wheel builds out of my little shop in Reno, mostly for the local cross crowd. Last Tuesday I had a guy bring in a rear wheel that he'd tried to true himself with an impact driver on the nipple end, and I counted 40 nipples that were rounded out or cracked before I stopped counting. The weird thing is, I used to reach for my drill on spoke tensioning back when I first started, and I told myself it was saving me time. It wasn't. I was going so fast that I'd blow past the point where the spoke stops stretching and starts pulling the rim, and then I'd have to back everything off and start over. Now I do it all by hand with a 3-cross and a Park TM-1, and even though each wheel takes me close to 90 minutes, I'm not snapping spokes or galling nipples anymore. The tool isn't the problem, it's that a drill hides the feel you need in your fingers to know when to stop. Anyone here got a cutoff point where they'll still use a driver, or is it hand tension all the way for you?
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