What Goes Into a Proper Wheel True

I've recently been touring shops in a new city and am a little appalled by the level of service you get for the money, specifically when it comes to wheel truing.

A typical wheel true, excepting spoke replacements or hammering out a dent, costs between $15 to $35, depending on how damaged the wheel is.

Minimum aspects of a proper wheel true are:

• Truing the left and right movement of the rim.
• Truing the up and down movement, or hop.
• Checking the tension of each spoke. You can do this with a tool called a tensiometer but experienced mechanics can approximate by hand or sound. 
• Checking the dish of the wheel, which means checking whether the rim is perfectly centered in the frame. 
• Inspecting the tire, hub, cassette, rim, and spokes for damage. 
• TEST RIDE whenever possible

Some shops offer a service called "spot truing" where they true the wheel without taking it out of the bike frame, using the brake pads as feelers. This is more of an emergency or quick fix to keep you on the road, not a real repair, and therefore should cost less than $15. It's also a good skill for the average cyclist to know. However, spot truing is inaccurate at best: it doesn't account for dish and it is difficult to true for hop or get the rim perfectly straight. To do the job right you need to take the wheel off the bike and put it in a truing stand, check the dish with a proper gauge, and test ride the machine afterwards. 

If you pay upwards of $20 for a wheel true and your mechanic does not do the work mentioned above, call him out. There are standards that we bike mechanics need to be held to and if one of us starts cutting corners it hurts the legitimacy of the bicycle repair business as a whole.

Stay tuned a tutorial on how to spot-true your own wheel.