Non-Drive Radial Lacing: Why Factory Rear Wheels Do It and Hand Builds Shouldn't

The most common rear-wheel lacing choice, the lazy reasoning behind it, and why one workshop laces the non-drive side the other way — with links to the original post.

Look at rear wheels — hand-built and factory — and a huge share are laced the same way: drive side crossed (tangential), non-drive side radial. It looks like a considered choice. Usually it isn't. Here is what one workshop has written about why it's so common, and why they deliberately do the opposite, with the source.

1. The most common rear lacing — and its real reason

The reasoning behind "drive tangential, non-drive radial" is, in the workshop's blunt telling, almost embarrassingly simple. Radial lacing gives the lowest total spoke weight — the wheel is "light in the hand." So you'd radial-lace both sides for lightness; then you make the drive side tangential because radial can't handle the freehub's drive torque. That's it. Non-drive radial isn't chosen for the non-drive side — it's just what's left after the drive side is forced to cross.

There's even a self-reinforcing comfort to it: a radial non-drive spoke touches no other spoke, so a slack one never ticks or pings. Low tension hides better. That's not a virtue — it's a way for a sloppy non-drive side to go unnoticed.

Source: Nomu Lab #180 — On non-drive radial lacing

2. Why a hand build should be non-drive tangential

On a plain hand-build — or a factory wheel that's just a hand-build with straight-pull spokes — doing the non-drive side radial "because everyone does" is, the workshop says, abandoning thought. The only benefits are a little weight and a little aero. Neither solves the real problem of a rear wheel: the slack, flex-prone non-drive side and the wheel-balance issues that come with it. Radial lacing there tends to make those worse, not better.

Source: Nomu Lab #180

3. The cost: about 30 grams

Being honest about the downside: on a 24-hole wheel, lacing the non-drive side tangential rather than radial adds roughly 30 grams (it varies with rim depth and spoke). But that weight is at the hub, not the rim — it isn't rotating mass out at the tyre, where weight actually matters. A concrete example: using the same rim and hub as a factory wheel listed at 735 g, the workshop's equivalent — laced 4:6 with the non-drive side tied and soldered — weighed 759 g. Twenty-four grams, for a meaningfully stiffer wheel.

Source: Nomu Lab #180

4. When non-drive radial is genuinely justified

This isn't a blanket "radial is bad." There are factory wheels where non-drive radial is part of a clever design, not laziness — and crucially, none of them can be reproduced with hand-build materials:

• 2:1 builds (Rolf originally, Fulcrum now): the non-drive side carries the whole side's load on half the usual spokes, so its tension shoots up — dramatically more than enough to offset the tension a radial non-drive side loses. Campagnolo's G3 groups spokes to the same effect.
• Mavic Cosmic Carbon Ultimate: pairs non-drive radial with a strong hi-lo flange and an offset rim, which all but erase the downside — and because the non-drive side is radial, it can use rim nipples and therefore be trued, which a tangential carbon-spoke side couldn't.
• Mavic R-SYS: drive side made radial (in alloy, to survive a chain-jam behind the cassette) which then forces the design's hand; its carbon spokes behave so differently under nipple adjustment that it can't be judged like a hand-built radial side at all.

Every one of these is a factory design. None is something you can choose at the workbench with ordinary spokes and nipples.

Source: Nomu Lab #180

5. The takeaway

If you're building a rear wheel by hand, the default to question is non-drive radial, not non-drive tangential. Cross the non-drive side; accept the ~30 g; get a stiffer, better-balanced wheel. Tangential lacing has practical upsides too — it's more resistant to going out of true, and on 28-hole-plus wheels the hub is genuinely easier to clean than a radial build's spoke thicket.

Sources: Nomu Lab #180, #2270 — Hidden advantages of tangential lacing