A customer brought in a Cosmic Carbon Altimate for servicing.
It's a completely unridden new bike.
Since it uses a tubular tire system, it comes with tubular tires
（attached but not glued on）,
but I had removed them by the time I took these photos.
Since there's barely anything to adjust, I thought there'd be nothing to do...
but it turned out to be quite problematic.
First, the front wheel—I can't true it or center it.
When I applied the centering gauge, it clicked into place perfectly with a satisfying snap.
Phew, that was close.
If it had been off, there would've been almost nothing I could do about it.
The hub rotation was heavy, so I made a light adjustment to it.
Next, the rear wheel:
The centering was off.
The reason I shot the rear wheel at an angle is
because the spokes were interfering with the camera.
It was off by just under 1mm,
which means I'd need to loosen the non-freehub side to adjust it.
Fortunately, the non-freehub side was over-tensioned,
so I was able to loosen it without bringing the spoke tension down to a point where it felt slack.
Once the centering gauge clicked perfectly on both sides,
I confirmed this with the customer as well.
I wrote some time ago that the reason the rear wheel on the Cosmic Carbon Altimate
is the only one with nipple adjustment capability wasn't for truing functionality
but to improve yield rates during manufacturing. Today was a perfect example of that—
thanks to this feature, a defective wheel became usable as a flawless product.
I also walked the customer through installing the tubular tires.
This is their first time with tubular wheels, but
I figured it would be a shame to give up on using this wheel just because of
unfamiliarity with tubulars,
so I think they made a good decision.
It's a completely unridden new bike.
Since it uses a tubular tire system, it comes with tubular tires
（attached but not glued on）,
but I had removed them by the time I took these photos.
Since there's barely anything to adjust, I thought there'd be nothing to do...
but it turned out to be quite problematic.
First, the front wheel—I can't true it or center it.
When I applied the centering gauge, it clicked into place perfectly with a satisfying snap.
Phew, that was close.
If it had been off, there would've been almost nothing I could do about it.
The hub rotation was heavy, so I made a light adjustment to it.
Next, the rear wheel:
The centering was off.
The reason I shot the rear wheel at an angle is
because the spokes were interfering with the camera.
It was off by just under 1mm,
which means I'd need to loosen the non-freehub side to adjust it.
Fortunately, the non-freehub side was over-tensioned,
so I was able to loosen it without bringing the spoke tension down to a point where it felt slack.
Once the centering gauge clicked perfectly on both sides,
I confirmed this with the customer as well.
I wrote some time ago that the reason the rear wheel on the Cosmic Carbon Altimate
is the only one with nipple adjustment capability wasn't for truing functionality
but to improve yield rates during manufacturing. Today was a perfect example of that—
thanks to this feature, a defective wheel became usable as a flawless product.
I also walked the customer through installing the tubular tires.
This is their first time with tubular wheels, but
I figured it would be a shame to give up on using this wheel just because of
unfamiliarity with tubulars,
so I think they made a good decision.