I was thinking of using JRA. Any thoughts, good or bad?

Cheers
Dickie

Whereabouts are you based?

I’ve had three Hope/Stans wheels built by JRA and they’ve all be great. Not the cheapest, but the service is first rate, and I haven’t had any issues with any of the builds.

DIY?

Wheel stand is about £30 for a basic one. Spokes from rose bikes are under 1/3 the price my LBS quoted, and none of mine have exploded (yet)!

Initialy I was a bit of a perfectionist about trueing/dishing, but after getting the front dishing wrong (the stand was QR only and the wheel 20mm, and the addapters added 5-10mm of dish) I just tweaked it in the frame and didn’t check for trueness and it’s still been fine.

Tips:
Follow charlies instructions to the letter, there are plenty of minor points that are actualy quite important (I didnt know rims were left/right handed for instance).

Good runny grease on the threads (R&R super slick left me with no spoke wind up at all which was nice).

Beer, it’s quite stressfull and took a few guesses at time, beer helped not care too much when I guessed wrong in a 50/50 decision and had to undo a load of spokes.

I can build them for you at a fair price if your after fully personal one to one service check my feedback on retrobike.co.uk build hundreds of wheels for the guys an girls there my emails in my profile

Chat to daren at strada, hes built all my wheels. Cant recommend him enough. Really nice guy aswell

2nd recommendation for Stradawheels – got a lovely set of Velocity road wheels from them & have been scooting around on one of their FRM/BOR 29er builds for the last couple of weeks – took a lot to give them back!

Had a few builds from JRA over the years as well which have all been excellent.

Just ordered my first wheel from JRA. A tad more expensive than someone like Merlin, but their decent reviews convinced me.

Thanks folks, I will look into Strada and Retrobike.