[analog31]

I've seen videos of wheel making "by machine." There is still some manual work, such as part or even all of lacing. If a wheel is laced "off," then it's pretty much downhill from there.

By day I'm an industrial physicist, and I've designed systems for doing automated mechanical adjustment. There's an 80/20 rule, where tightening the specs can dramatically increase the cycle time. So, you can make more widgets per hour if you relax the specs.

[schoen]

I remember taking a bike maintenance class where the instructor said that mechanical wheelbuilding has not reached the level of quality of hand wheelbuilding (maybe he even said "has not approached").

Since this part of the thread is kind of about that question, I would like to ask: how come? Isn't machines' consistency something that could be very useful here? And if not, couldn't tools like the one presented by the original post help the machines reach a high standard?