Bill,
What you say is correct. However, in the normal daily business of selling
and repairing bicycles, speed is a key ingredient to wheel building. In fact
now prebuilt wheels dominate the market. As a former bike racer who "switched
over" going to work for Schwinn, I used to hear a lot of complaints about
poorly built wheels. But for the bulk of the bike riding public, factory machine
built wheels were OK. I never learned to build wheels myself, prefering
instead to leave it to experts such as Oscar Juner or, yes, Spence Wolf. I always
heard that his wife, Lillian, would lace the wheels and Spence would tension
them. Later at Schwinn when we purchased Kestrel, they did not want us to build
wheels for them, but I went to our wheel builder in Southern California,
Sta-Tru Wheels, and said I wanted a wheel that was built properly, and didn't care
that took longer and cost more to do, to just do it, they came back with a
wheel that suprised the Kestrel people. We used our wheels for the Kestrel kit
program.
Dave Staub