Custom Wheel Building - What are our qualifications? There are quite a number of places you can go to for custom wheel building and custom wheels are expensive.  It makes sense for you to know the qualifications of the company who is going to build your wheels. I was the first to go to Taiwan to set up high end wheel building in Taiwan about 10 years ago.  Even though I had thought of myself as a good wheel builder I wanted some insurance so I hired one of the founders of Wheelsmith as a consultant.  He came with me on some of the first trips along with the owner of Velomax - who wanted us to set up production in Taiwan for him.  We all pooled our resources and made contributions to the overall quality of our wheels.  Between Wheelsmith, Velomax and myself I am certain we had built many, thousands of wheels and had seen what happens to them over time. What you will pretty much hear from everyone now is that the spoke tension on all the wheels should be as even as possible and that it should be high.  Both are true.  To be totally honest, it's not that difficult to build high qulaity wheels as long as you are trained by someone who knows what they are doing and as long as you build a lot of them.  The more the better. Someone who builds wheels all day, every day is going to be far superior to someone who builds a few sets a week.  The reason isn't obvious and I have never seen it mentioned anywhere before.  Most quality wheels rely on low spoke counts and many on alloy nipples.  In fact one of the reasons that you hear of many people and shops saying it's not possible to build durable wheels with low spoke counts and alloy nipples is because they can't.  This is where the quality of the builder is key. When you tension a nipple on an alloy rim, every time you tension it you stress it.  Particularly at the end of the process when the tensions are high. The more times you touch a nipple the more you stress the rim and nipple.  If you do it too many times you frequently will strip a nipple and I have even seen rims ripped on their side wall because of too much manipulation. The experienced builder makes almost no extra nipple turns.  He or she knows exactly how to straighten the rim to high tension with the fewest amount of spoke turns. This may seem like a small issue but it's not because rear rims cracks are almost all the main cause of failure on all of the lower spoke wheels and the weaker the rim and nipples are the easier it is to crack them. Our head wheel builder now is Bob Edwards.  He's been doing building here for the last 4 years and is over 80 years old with about 40 years of wheel building experience under his belt.  In fact, everyone who works here is trained on wheel building as a matter of course.  We are still primarily a wheel company so everyone needs to know how it's done. When you buy a custom wheel from us you can be confident that whomever builds it know exactly what he or she is doing.  All wheels are built to a spec for spoke tension and lateral and radial run out.  Spoke tensions are made as equal as possible but most importantly, we know how to get them to their final specs with the least amount of manipulation.