Wheel building for geeks, nerds and compleat idiots

I've been dinking around with wheelbuiding and wheel repair since Kevin King and Sally Hildt tried to teach me a little bit about building back during my bike racing days in Seattle.  I still regard them as masters of the craft, and I'm just a piker.  But I do know how to lace up wheels, properly tension them, and they rarely blow up.  
In the last few months though, I've started working on upping my technology, adding to my existing Park Pro truing stand.  I've found several resources like wheelfanatyks, plus pretty good reference sites like Sapim's website, spoke calculators from Sapim, Wheelpro, and Pro Wheelbuilder. I also like Eric's blog, from whom I have unabashedly stolen some great ideas.

Roger Musson's Wheelpro site does a great job of discussing how to build, so I won't repeat that and Eric has a pretty detailed analysis of how to take measurements, what to measure, and a bit on why it's important.  I didn't want to analyze this too heavily, just get to the point that I could build a wheel that is 'dead on'.  

Modern rims, like the HED Belgium C2, make this pretty easy compared to the old (and flexible) 19mm x 15mm road rims of the 80s.  Let's face it - 36 spokes was de rigueur for any sort of wheel that you wanted to rely upon.  Now, the options are plentiful - if a tad more expensive and heavier.  

I'm still getting my wheel stand workspace dialed in, and there are a couple of 'gotta gets' left to make it like I want, starting with a solid steel plate base.  Two reasons for this. First, a half inch plate of steel isn't going to move unless I want it to. Second, it's magnetic, which provides a place to affix the dial indicator in a little more stable manner than my current 'on the stand leg' position.
Next is better lighting.  My building workspace is in a 'crawl space' in the basement. 5'11" clearance, not great light, but it's warm, dry and spider free. A task light and some side light would be nice.

So anyway, there are a couple of new tools that I've added to the kit.  A Hozan spoke tension meter, which I've always coveted, and sniped on ebay for a pretty good price (but had to wait 30 days for USPS and Italie Poste to deliver); and a Spokey spoke wrench.  Inexpensive, easy on the fingers, and spot on placement.  I also picked up the dial indicator and base from a local 2nd hand tool store.  It's accurate to .001", which is plenty for me.  I've always built good wheels, but the geek in me has always looked for repeatability and metrics.

After all that, here's what I wound up with for the wheel I just rebuilt. I reused the spokes (Sapim CX-Ray) because they were in pretty good shape, and the things are bloody expensive to go get new ones.  I used to buy DT straight gauge by the box for what a handful of these would cost!  I was shooting for a drive side tension of around 160, so this should be pretty good.  I guess I'll find out on the road.