A customer brought in the rear wheel of a 9000 C24 tubular for repair.
They wanted me to fix the wheel centering issue,
but when a customer definitively reports that something is "off-center,"
you know it must be pretty bad...
It was seriously off-center.
No, no, no — this is wrong.
This definitely isn't what left the factory like this.
The rim is biased toward the non-drive side,
and there's no way you could even get close to brake rub clearance, let alone proper setup.
I don't know what happened, but someone definitely got overzealous with spoke truing.
It's fixed now.
I could've just loosened the non-drive side spokes to center it,
but the non-drive side was so incredibly loose
that I ended up doing a complete spoke re-tensioning job.
Since I had to relax the drive side spokes quite a bit too,
it essentially amounted to rebuilding the whole wheel.
The third instance of the wide flange deception (→here) means the flange width is quite generous.
The spoke heads sit right at the edge of the hub shell, so it's pretty impressive.
Not related to this wheel, but
track hubs come in two varieties: double-threaded and single-threaded,
and the single-threaded hubs where sprockets only fit on one side
have a slight taper to them.
Dura-Ace Track hubs are like this too.
Which means even if left and right spoke tension can't be perfectly balanced,
having the wider flange width is what matters most.
Any difference in spoke tension between sides that results from that
can be addressed through other means.
（As per my usual argument）
They wanted me to fix the wheel centering issue,
but when a customer definitively reports that something is "off-center,"
you know it must be pretty bad...
It was seriously off-center.
No, no, no — this is wrong.
This definitely isn't what left the factory like this.
The rim is biased toward the non-drive side,
and there's no way you could even get close to brake rub clearance, let alone proper setup.
I don't know what happened, but someone definitely got overzealous with spoke truing.
It's fixed now.
I could've just loosened the non-drive side spokes to center it,
but the non-drive side was so incredibly loose
that I ended up doing a complete spoke re-tensioning job.
Since I had to relax the drive side spokes quite a bit too,
it essentially amounted to rebuilding the whole wheel.
The third instance of the wide flange deception (→here) means the flange width is quite generous.
The spoke heads sit right at the edge of the hub shell, so it's pretty impressive.
Not related to this wheel, but
track hubs come in two varieties: double-threaded and single-threaded,
and the single-threaded hubs where sprockets only fit on one side
have a slight taper to them.
Dura-Ace Track hubs are like this too.
Which means even if left and right spoke tension can't be perfectly balanced,
having the wider flange width is what matters most.
Any difference in spoke tension between sides that results from that
can be addressed through other means.
（As per my usual argument）