That's the thing about all those hardly-productive hours we spent torturing wheels back into true, repairing the things that mortals would discard: After a while, one gets really good at it, and multible trips between the trueing stand and the bending table (floor and a 2X4, in my case) yield a true and evenly-tensioned wheel, for reasonable effort. These skills can even make your day, like when you taco a wheel during CX practice or fix the fellow rider's wheel in an emergency (or my own, in a couple-too-many instances), and can put our shops out of business.
Then there's the cheap parts we learned to polish to look like good ones, the odd-looking-but-functional mis-matching of parts, tubes with xx patches, inventive ways to restore threaded interfaces, spacer washers between pad holders and caliper arms, home-spun (even road-side) frame or chainring re-alignment, using LocTite on poor press-fits, spliced-together chain repairs, re-using handlebar tape to the bitter end, scrounging discarded bottles, "making" stuff work, and I wont even mention the straightening of bars and stems, riding on aged tires or riding in tattered lycra.
On an OT note, there's the scrubbing out of the inside liners of cable housings, using a bent, kinked inner wire and some cleaner, and massaging the sticky grunge from the inner wire using a dab of GripShift lube. Oh, what it would cost to restore and maintain all those bikes using new cables!
David Snyder, Still re-using all manner of spokes and cables/housing in sunny Auburn, CA
>I lived off of old tires all the time. I would fix two tubulars and would
>keep one as payment I did not have to buy a tire for years.
> Steven Willis