Wheelbuilding / Wheel Building / Wheel build help

I use a length of half-inch alloy rod with the ends machined into round ends and some bar tape on one end. Then I put that between interleaved spokes and give them a bit of a tweek. A bit like Sheldon shows being done with an old crank arm.

currently squeezing parallel pairs of spokes after every round of tensioning

You only need to do it right once. The idea is to take any stresses at the outside of bend points past their yield point. Once they have been done once, there shouldn't be any more residual stress to relieve. Wait until your tension is at the final value, then stress relieve. You should find that all the spokes have lost a small amount of tension, in an ideal world all the same and the shape won't have changed, but finishing is the process of bringing everything back into line and evenly tensioned after the inevitable asymmetries of stress relief have manifested themselves 🙂

I squeeze pairs of spokes but I end up having to use a something dandruff uses with round spokes. With aero spokes I dont as the blade edge might be damaged and also the aero spokes seem respond better to hand squeezing than round spokes do. I always stress until the wheel no longer fo out of true. The final test is to push the rim with the wheel resting on the end cap. If it out of true then back to work.

I get more than a little tension drop too. After retensioning and stressing again I get a further tension drop.

In years of doing this I have never stressed once and it's enough. It probably is but if I can stress a wheel and it goes out that's unacceptable to me and back in the jig it goes.

One odd thing with a front wheel built with lasers stressing can put a dished wheel out of dish. Odd I know. It happened again today. I think I'm a bit OCD with the stressing.

Stressing also rarely make the wheel.more u round. It can do the opposite. Its lateral rudeness that often affected.

I use a wooden bar, cut from a mop or similar, to lever spokes towards and beyond their final position, twice, once after lacing, to ensure spokes are orientated correctly, and then again at final tension (though I repeat this until the wheel stays true). You're looking to increase the tension a fair amount (to stress relieve), so it's a lot of force squeezing spokes and hard on the knuckles.

It's actually two processes at once, stress relieving (to give spoke durability) and removing the spoke wound up (to give a true wheel).