I built up my own wheels for my LHT and those wheels are now on my VO Pass Hunter, the wheels for my Sherpa, for my Airnimal Joey foldup, and for my Nomad. All of these bikes I bought the frame and built it up for myself.
I worked in a bike shop in the early 70s, was not good at building wheels at that time. There were between 15 and 20 of us working as mechanics, it was a large bike shop. When new bikes came in and had to be assembled, the wheels were never in true. Since we had many more mechanics than truing stands, I got quite competent at using the bike brake blocks in the frame as my truing stand. There were some very good mechanics there, they always did the complete wheel building, so I only built wheels for myself.
But when I built up my LHT in 2004, I decided to try wheel building again. With the time lapse I could not remember how to go about building a wheel, so I was happy to find that Sheldon put together a very good article on how at:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.htmlEven though I had built wheels before, after reading Sheldon's article I felt that I knew more than I had known when I worked in the shop. Without that article, I probably would have bought complete wheels. And the internet made spoke length calculators easy to find. I was quite pleased with my first set of wheels after reading that article.
I shared that Sheldon Brown article with a friend who used to be a co-worker before we both retired. He used it to learn how to build wheels too. He now works one day a week as a bike mechanic at a bike charity. He was the only one that knew how to build wheels there, so he taught the other mechanics how to build wheels, all from that Sheldon Brown article and his own wheel building experience.
On two of my sets of wheels before long tours, I brought them in to the charity where my friend works and he checked my spoke tension with a Park meter, I do not have a meter to check that so was happy that he has access to one.
I have not invested in a better truing stand, I still use the bike frame and brake blocks as my truing stand. Since I trued up wheels that way decades ago, I got used to it, so a truing stand would be little benefit to me. I do not have a dishing tool, instead I frequently turn my wheel around in the frame so that if the rim is off to one side, it becomes very apparent and can be adjusted during the truing phase.
But I can say with certainty that a good spoke wrench is worth having so you do not round off any nipples. I have several Park spoke wrenches in three colors for different gauge nipples. And I carry one of those on my bike tours.
When practical I buy Wheelsmith DB-14 spokes. On my Nomad (my most recent set of wheels) I used straight gauge instead on the rear wheel simply because I could not find the right length DB-14 spokes for the Rohloff wheel, but someone had the straight gauge ones in my length on sale. Also on the Nomad I used Sapim nipples for the first time for both front and rear.
I used to buy my spokes from a local shop that would measure my hub, my rim, calculate the spoke lengths I needed and sell me the spokes at a very good price with two spare spokes per wheel. That shop closed, so for my most recent wheel set (the Nomad) I had to calculate the spoke lengths and buy the spokes elsewhere. A bag of 50 was cheaper than the other local shops wanted for 36, so I changed my spoke source to the internet instead of a local shop. Fortunately the Nomad has two undished wheels, so only needed two bags of spokes, not three.
I mainly do the wheel building myself because bike mechanic stuff is a hobby that I enjoy. Thus, I do not mind spending the time working on them. And that way I can choose the exact spokes, rims and hubs that I want. I might have the only Nomad that has a 36 spoke Rohloff wheel in back and a SP dynohub on the front. Fortunately SJS could supply the CSS rim I thought I wanted in 36 spokes with the Rohloff drilling for the Nomad.
