-
Spoke weight is generally quoted at the shortest length they offer, for obvious reasons. Personally I'd just go for 32h but if they're built right 28H could/should be fine for 80kg.
ACI Alpina are currently the cheapest double butted you can order in the UK. You won't see much of an improvement spending more on fancier spokes than those.
With regards to wheel building, get a decent tension meter and do a lot of research before building. No reason you couldnt build a bombproof pair of wheels on little experience. The key is just taking your time and continually adjusting until all the tensions are even, the wheel is true and round. This might take up a whole afternoon per wheel so paying someone like Arup ~£20ish per wheel to do this for you could be economical. Having verniers to measure up the hubs and rims is also crucial
Turkish-
ACI Alpina are currently the cheapest double butted you can order in the UK. You won't see much of an improvement spending more on fancier spokes than those.
Cool, I'm absolutely not bothered by 30g extra weight on the spokes, so I'll go for those.
With regards to wheel building, get a decent tension meter and do a lot of research before building. No reason you couldnt build a bombproof pair of wheels on little experience. The key is just taking your time and continually adjusting until all the tensions are even, the wheel is true and round. This might take up a whole afternoon per wheel so paying someone like Arup ~£20ish per wheel to do this for you could be economical. Having verniers to measure up the hubs and rims is also crucial
I have some calipers so that should be fine. I built my last wheel without a tension meter - got it true and round eventually but it took a bloody long time... I took it into the shop afterwards just to have it checked over and the guy said I'd done a great job. So I'd probably just wing it on the tension again and just ping them to check the pitch is approximately even. Then take them to the shop for a check over if they don't seem to be staying true or something.
Like I said I do already have a set of wheels that do the job - they're just overbuilt for 99% of my riding - so I can ride them in the meantime and spend an age on the build process.
-
a decent tension meter like sapim or DT swiss. The sapim guage is £560 and the DT Swiss guage is £400. These guages come with there own spoke calibration chart and while a sapim race and DT comp are close if you use both gauges on the same spokes and refer to each other tension chart you get different tensions (less than 100N difference) not enough to cause a major problem. not sure if the sapim guage chart or the DT Swiss chart is wrong as I can create my own with my own load cell and get something a bit different not by much though. The DT Gauge does not CX-ray or the pillar 1422 spokes on the NDS rear. I dont know if it shows a reading for the aerolite nds rear maybe not which makes it a bit pointless as your back to tone.
The park TM-1 is no better than tone useful if your deaf I suppose but it is not marked as a aid to deaf wheel builders. parks calibration chart does not match any other.
frankenbike
cycleclinic
Spokes and nipples I just guessed at from the Pillar website. But no prices so I don't know if I was looking at something too expensive.
Purely that those Pacenti rims are super cheap on PlanetX at the moment. I'm thinking CL25 instead of TL28 though; 25g lighter each and a more suitable rim width for what I want, only £5 more.