If a spoke torque wrench is a must have for someone, Posse has one that goes from 30 to 150 lb in, comes with 10 heads for just over a Ben Franklin.

http://pitposse.com/potowrkit.html

 

I still have mine,when running spokes it got used a lot.you also need a stand to be able to spin the wheel and gauge how you are doing.Also make sure you know the rim spacing,some of the first all aluminum primary Harleys had the rims spaced .080 to the left of center to balance the bikes,as I remember.

 

I think they are way overpriced considereing you dont need one to maintain the spokes.

Is there even a torque value for the spokes?

 

Holy crap! Those are expensive!!! Nice, but very expensive!!!! LOL I'd rather put on cast wheels and not worry about it.

 

Are spokes all set to the same torque to start with? I would think there's a minimum & a maximum value for torque, but isn't having a range how you true a wheel? I've never done a wheel on my Harley, but on bicycles that's the case AFAIK?

 

I got this one: http://www.sandhillspowersports.com/...oketorquewr_06

The Excel comes with all necessary heads to do Harleys and the torque value is adjustable. Some are not.

I found all the spokes on my Heritage were way under the 55in pd spec in the HD manual. As I recall I did them all at 40 in pds using the system from the Fasst website. Didn't want to mess with them too much till I learned a bit more about the process.

What confused me was that I read somewhere that when the wheels are trued at the factory each spoke gets a different torque value. So you can't just torque them all the same or you could pull the wheel out of true.

Question to be answered then would be if that's true why would HD put a torque spec in their maintenance manual. I still haven't found an answer to that question.

 

that's interesting. should be someone in here that should know the answer to that one

 

Lay 100 spokes out before you and try to find the ones that are exactly the same length, down to the 100th of a mm. If they're not perfect, then to tighten them all to the same spec would cause deformation in the wheel, wouldn't it?

 

This is what I was wondering in my post above. I could see that there's a minimum torque that they all have to be, and then you would adjust the ones needed to true the wheel by tightening them further to some figure less than the maximum allowable torque value.

 

I think I like the ting method. It's alot less expensive and less confusing.