Straightening a Shimano M776 wheel before selling it, but it’s resisting manfully all attempts to make it perfectly round.

It’s an oldish wheel and the proprietary tool isn’t up to much, but I’d still hope to have made progress on it this evening.

I know that it’s an odd set-up with screw-in spokes, but us there anything I should otherwise be aware of?

Getting it up there for the morning crowd.

So to speak.

This might be what you are doing already, but you need to use the flat bit of the spoke near the nipple to stop the spoke rotating when you tighten the nipple. There’s a slot in the tool to do this – which means you really need two tools, one to grip the spoke and one to turn the (odd-sized) nipple.

See “Replacing spokes” section here;
http://www.shimano.com/media/techdocs/content/cycle/SI/Wheel/MTB/SI_4DD0A_002/SI_4DD0A_001_En_v1_m56577569830616148.pdf

Ah – thanks. No, not doing that. That more sense.

Got the tool, but as a spoke key it’s a bit rubbish…

It looks like the nipple tightens clockwise while looking at it from the hub (as opposed to clockwise when looking at it from the tyre-side, as you would when building a regular wheel) – is that correct?

It’s often easiest to true for roundness first, so if it’s fairly straight and pretty tight you could try de-tensioning the whole wheel a little bit then have another shot at getting it round. You’ll have more headroom to play with to tighten spokes to pull it in. Once it’s round you can tension it up a little more and do a final tweak on the straightness.

It looks like the nipple tightens clockwise while looking at it from the hub (as opposed to clockwise when looking at it from the tyre-side, as you would when building a regular wheel) – is that correct?

Yep, I think so.

It’s often easiest to true for roundness first, so if it’s fairly straight and pretty tight you could try de-tensioning the whole wheel a little bit then have another shot at getting it round. You’ll have more headroom to play with to tighten spokes to pull it in. Once it’s round you can tension it up a little more and do a final tweak on the straightness.

Yeap – round first, then side-to-side. It’s what i was doing, but it became apparent quickly that things weren’t going quite as I expected. After stopping, thinking about it and posting on here, I worked out that this may be the problem:

It looks like the nipple tightens clockwise while looking at it from the hub (as opposed to clockwise when looking at it from the tyre-side, as you would when building a regular wheel) – is that correct?

Yep, I think so.

Nothing like chucking an opposite thread into the mix to spice things up. 🙂

See if my monkey-metal Shimano tool will survive long enough to avoid destroying the nipples now… 😕