I've never built or adjusted a wheel. My understanding its not for the faint of heart. The late husband of one my CS professors (Sheldon Brown) put together a solid bike resource on the web...

He has some hints on wheel adjustment (after describing building)

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html

sometimes local bike shops have wheel building classes.

Yeah it's an art. Sometimes you true a wheel and it just works. Sometimes it's like you're stuck in some local minima and can't get out; The wheel is egg shaped, so you tighten the long sides, then it's round but suddenly the wheel is tilted instead, you fix it but now it's off center, you fix it but the tension is wrong, you fix it but now it's egg shaped again..

You offer a good description of adjusting a wheel that is tensioned beyond its natural limit. Sometimes the art is making an assessment of the rim and deciding the best set of trade-offs given the rim's limitations.

> One thing I've noticed is that when you take a sharp turn on a mountain bike, you tend to move the bike away from your body. But on a road bike, you maintain that alignment with your body and the frame.

I don't know the answer but will toss out a guess.

I'd speculate one of the biggest differences is how each bike is used and its intended design based on that use case. Centrifugal forces combined with traction of tire to surface will be very different between road bike tires at high speed on pavement versus mountain bike tire and low/moderate speeds on dirt. Beyond that, a mountain bike is often rode through technical terrain that requires dynamic balance by the rider (rider strategically shifts weight over bike) - whereas road bikes appear to be rode with a more "static" balance between rider and bike.

You say you have difficulty adjusting spoke tension but you don't say what the problem is. Do you have a spoke tensiometer? I consider it manadatory (you don't have to have a fancy electronic one although they're a pleasure to use).

> But on a road bike, you maintain that alignment with your body and the frame

I used to do this until recently. It is now a bad habit of mine. On a mountain descent you'll want to steer that road bike how you would a mountain bike by leaning the bike and counter leaning your body. The more gradual the turn and lower thd speed, the less it will matter.

1. Go around the wheel and use a tension gauge to make all the spokes equivalent in tension. Then go around and fix the lateral and radial runout.

2. Has to do with geometry and thickness of the tires.

To generalize the article even more, the way a bike turns is like this: for a given speed and radius through a corner, there is a necessary lean angle. That lean angle determines the camber thrust of the tires, which is the centripetal force that makes the bike turn. However, you also have to make the bike yaw, which means the front has to generate a greater sideways force than the rear. This is accomplished through adding steering angle to the front tire. The longer the bike is, the greater the difference that is needed between front and rear sideways forces.

Furthermore, the steering angle of the front tire is affected by the head angle (90-rake angle), and geometric trail (caster effect). The greater the geometric trail is, the more the tire wants to resist turning. The greater the speed, the higher this effect. Conversely, the slacker the head angle is (lower in value, greater rake angle), the more the front tire wants to turn into the turn (because the wheel axle lower in height with increasing steering angle).

The reason why you generally lean the mountain bikes under you are 2 fold. First, the bikes are longer, so naturally you need the greater difference, which means you need more force from the front. You would exceed the max slip angle of the front tire if you stayed upright, especially on looser dirt. So instead, you lean the bike more to engage camber thrust. Secondly, the tires on mountainbikes are designed with side knobs specifically for cornering, so you want to engage those knobs.

The opposite problem exists on street motorcycles, where the bikes need to be low enough to the ground to not backflip on acceleration, which limits the available bike lean angle. So instead, riders learn to hang off the bike. This in turn requires the front end to be turned more. As a consequence of this, bikes understeer or oversteer behavior is greatly depends on the front end geometry (rake and trail). The trail forces are magnified at the higher speeds, so you need careful tuning of things like fork offsets (which control trail), and rake angle, both of which are affected by suspension moving up and down.

Yet, on supermoto bikes (i.e dirtbikes with street tires, popular in europe), you don't have the ground clearance problem, so you can actually corner them either like street bikes with knee down, or dirt bike style while leaning the bike under you.