Tensiometer reviews or experience with "teny" or Taiwan dt copies

[pavel]

If you go to ebay and search for tensiometer you can find many analog and digital tensiometers sold under several brands, all of which appear to be derivative of the dt Swiss design at a fraction of the cost, nearly the same as retail of a park. Any experience with these? I would like to get a digital tensiometer but man not ready to spend 300 on a wheel fanatyk tool.

They look nice enough and hopefully be more precise than a park, but I can't find any reviews.

[11.4]

A tensiometer is simply a meter and two points that the spoke is bent across. You pick a width for the two points so you get enough deflection to measure accurately. So the cost of making one is pretty small. But then you want it to be accurate and to make the tension measurement both accurate and reproducible over time takes a bit of engineering and some decent testing. No question DT prices their wheelbuilding equipment with a lot of pride, but they also make some of the very best. My worry about the imported imitations -- and I've used a variety of them on occasion, though I own a DT and always use it when I'm building wheels in my own shop -- is that they aren't made for precision. Now wheelbuilding doesn't need absolute reproducibility all that much. You should be building wheels such that you can tension them to the point where all the spokes like to acquire the same tension and hold it after stressing, so you just need to be able to measure 28 spokes or whatever and know you're getting the same measurement for each. With that in mind, if you want to go budget, I'd just go with one of the Wheelsmith or Park units rather than going to an offshore knockoff. Your own wheelbuilding skills will more likely be a limitation than the accuracy of your tensiometer, and the better you are, the more you use your judgment and the less critical the tensiometer is anyway.