I took in a rear wheel from an original Racing 1 from a customer.
They said there were various issues to fix, but as I've written before,
when customers are aware of symptoms that obvious,
the condition has usually progressed to the point where you think
"Why on earth did you let it get this bad?!"
This one? Yeah, it's like that (defensive mode activated).
In the photo, the tire and sprocket have been removed.
There was play in the hub bearing cones.
Surprisingly (no offense), the bearings themselves weren't that damaged,
so I addressed it with a regreasing.
You can't do truing without eliminating the play first.
Apparently this wheel's been trued many times before,
and most of the nipples were stripped or close to it,
but using sharp, nearly-new tools works fine for turning them (mostly).
The centering was wildly off,
but fortunately it was fixable by tightening on the non-freewheel side.
If it had been the other way, it would've been much harder.
There was a section that looked like they got really focused on lateral truing
and ended up with significant radial runout instead.
That's not the kind of runout you notice while riding.
This gave me quite a fight.
It took about as much time as building a wheel from scratch with new rim, spokes, and nipples,
but since I'd rather not keep it as a job in progress,
I did it all while they waited.
Any nipples that were too far gone got replaced.
The top one in the photo is new, the bottom two are the replacements.
They weren't completely stripped from the start—I made them worse by grabbing them with vise grips to get them out—
but they wouldn't take a tool at all from the beginning (which is why they brought it in),
so they needed replacing either way.
↑As usual, the right axle nut came loose by hand.
With Campagnolo/Fulcrum wheels, I've developed a reflex to check this spot every time.
It comes loose pretty often, so if your wheel has this same structure,
you might want to take another look at it.
Done.
When they first brought it in, I thought maybe the rim had been bent from impact,
but if that's not the case, with enough time and care you can restore it to original.
Since the bearings were in good health, keep riding it hard.
If the repair hadn't worked out, we were about to take a deposit on a Nomu Lab Wheel 1,
but this wheel is the better one, so definitely use this one.
I cleaned the sprocket.
When that's clean, the whole wheel somehow looks cleaner too.
(Not implying the wheel is actually dirty—just wanted to clarify that.)
They said there were various issues to fix, but as I've written before,
when customers are aware of symptoms that obvious,
the condition has usually progressed to the point where you think
"Why on earth did you let it get this bad?!"
This one? Yeah, it's like that (defensive mode activated).
In the photo, the tire and sprocket have been removed.
There was play in the hub bearing cones.
Surprisingly (no offense), the bearings themselves weren't that damaged,
so I addressed it with a regreasing.
You can't do truing without eliminating the play first.
Apparently this wheel's been trued many times before,
and most of the nipples were stripped or close to it,
but using sharp, nearly-new tools works fine for turning them (mostly).
The centering was wildly off,
but fortunately it was fixable by tightening on the non-freewheel side.
If it had been the other way, it would've been much harder.
There was a section that looked like they got really focused on lateral truing
and ended up with significant radial runout instead.
That's not the kind of runout you notice while riding.
This gave me quite a fight.
It took about as much time as building a wheel from scratch with new rim, spokes, and nipples,
but since I'd rather not keep it as a job in progress,
I did it all while they waited.
Any nipples that were too far gone got replaced.
The top one in the photo is new, the bottom two are the replacements.
They weren't completely stripped from the start—I made them worse by grabbing them with vise grips to get them out—
but they wouldn't take a tool at all from the beginning (which is why they brought it in),
so they needed replacing either way.
↑As usual, the right axle nut came loose by hand.
With Campagnolo/Fulcrum wheels, I've developed a reflex to check this spot every time.
It comes loose pretty often, so if your wheel has this same structure,
you might want to take another look at it.
Done.
When they first brought it in, I thought maybe the rim had been bent from impact,
but if that's not the case, with enough time and care you can restore it to original.
Since the bearings were in good health, keep riding it hard.
If the repair hadn't worked out, we were about to take a deposit on a Nomu Lab Wheel 1,
but this wheel is the better one, so definitely use this one.
I cleaned the sprocket.
When that's clean, the whole wheel somehow looks cleaner too.
(Not implying the wheel is actually dirty—just wanted to clarify that.)