Yes, another long post.
Today I'm talking about nupoke.
Not spoke, but nupoke.
When you search Google for it,
it shows "Did you mean: spoke"
So it's clear there's no common homonym for this word.
Which makes sense, because this is my own made-up term.
First, a note: In my diagrams and reference photos, unless otherwise stated,
the direction of travel is toward the right side of the image.
When building a wheel, you thread spokes through the hub flanges,
In the case where you thread spokes from the inside of the hub outward,
↑This state will be called nupoke in this blog from now on.
It's just tedious to write "spoke threaded from inside" every time.
Similarly, when threading spokes from the outside of the hub inward,
↑This state will be called anti-nupoke from now on.
I could call it reverse-nupoke, but anti-nupoke is easier to type on a keyboard.
Broadly speaking, normal wheels have two types of lacing patterns.
When you lace spokes so they don't cross from the hub center, the spokes appear radial,
so this is called radial lacing.
I suspect the earliest spoke wheels were probably radial laced,
but radial lacing has both merits and demerits (I'll go into detail later since this is getting long),
and until the late 1980s when materials and structures appeared that could overcome these,
wheels were predominantly tangent laced (like the wheel shown in the photo above).
In tangent lacing, the spokes threaded through the hub flanges alternate between nupoke and anti-nupoke (except for special two-spoke patterns).
When I diagram the two spokes coming from adjacent holes in the hub flanges
that extend in non-intersecting directions,
it looks like this, and
because this direction is close to a tangent line (tangent) to the circle,
this lacing pattern is called tangent lacing.
As mentioned at the start,
from here on I'll discuss everything with the right side as the direction of travel.
With spokes all tangled up, it's hard to see clearly, so
I'm going to keep just the four spokes with red nipples fully visible in the photo above
to make it easier to understand.
A normal wheel has these four spokes as one group,
and if there are six such groups it's 24H, seven groups is 28H, eight groups is 32H, and so on.
But before that . . .
I prepared colored spokes. I'll thread these as nupoke.
Red is nupoke from my perspective in front,
blue is nupoke from my perspective in back, and I'll thread them through the hub.
↑When the rear two of the four spokes relative to the direction of travel are nupoke,
that's Italian lacing.
↑I flipped it from the previous state.
Now the nupoke becomes the front two spokes relative to the direction of travel.
This is reverse Italian lacing.
↑In contrast, when the front and rear two spokes relative to the direction of travel are nupoke,
that's JIS lacing.
The red nupoke is the same as Italian lacing,
but the blue nupoke is opposite.
↑With JIS lacing, flipping it doesn't change the positional relationship of the nupoke.
Whether nupoke extends forward or backward relative to the direction of travel
is extremely important.
For a 16H tangent-laced wheel, if I diagram only the nupoke,
with front nupoke in red and back nupoke in blue,
in Italian lacing it looks like this:
In JIS it's like this. To belabor the point,
in both Italian and JIS, the positional relationship of red nupoke is the same.
↑It's extending in this direction.
This, where nupoke points backward when viewing the top half of the wheel,
is very important for the rear wheel.
I'll call this the "porcupine direction."
↑So I prepared a "right-nupoke-only wheel."
To reiterate, whether Italian or JIS, the nupoke from the right flange is in the porcupine direction.
↓
While riding, the freewheel body has a sprocket on it, the chain wraps around it,
and when you push down on the pedal via the crank arm from above, intense twisting force is applied forward.
Expressing that with a hand, it looks like this:
Since holding the freewheel part doesn't show the hub flange,
I'll hold the hub body and twist it forward.
To see how the force is applied, spoke tension is slack—
they're not tight.
↓
You can see the spokes get further cinched and tightened.
In an actual properly-built state they don't deform this much,
but this shows they're constantly under this kind of stress.
So what happens if right nupoke is in the anti-porcupine direction?
This happens with reverse Italian or reverse JIS lacing, but . . .
↓
The spoke tension goes in the loosening direction rather than the tightening direction.
If the tire isn't inflated, the spokes would stick out from the rim.
When you crank hard on the pedals, which direction would better transmit
that force to the outside of the rear wheel?
Obviously the case where right nupoke is in the porcupine direction.
You might think "that's obvious," but I've seen complete bikes from manufacturers
with hand-built wheels in reverse Italian lacing, and
complete wheels with straight-pull spoke hubs where the rightmost spoke
is in the anti-porcupine direction, so
you should pay close attention to these things.
I'll go into specific examples later since this is already long.
Say there's a rubber cylinder with evenly-spaced marks . . .
If you twist the end, the twist deformation increases closer to where the twist is applied.
Imagining this on a rear hub,
↓
It works out like this. The spoke taking the most force from pedaling force is the right nupoke,
so right nupoke should be in the porcupine direction.
Next is the case with rim brakes.
A wheel with nupoke in porcupine direction is rolling.
From that state, I applied hard brakes.
The rim's rotation stopped instantly, but
the hub didn't stop instantly, so the spokes
got further cinched in the porcupine direction.
That phenomenon occurs. With Italian lacing, this gets cinched equally on both sides,
but with JIS lacing, the stress on the left side spokes relative to the direction of travel
goes in the tension-loosening direction.
This asymmetry is what I find unpleasant.
Let me look at this differently.
With a low-profile rim, the nipple holes alternate left and right.
↑When assembled, it looks like this.
Actually, this wheel is a Campagnolo Neutron, and
as shown in the rim decal, Neutron uses internal nipples.
The external-nipple Neutron is . . .
I'll cut this short and won't detail it later either.
So, a rim with hole offset,
assembled like this.
↑This is a blue marker, but for our purposes,
imagine it's "a magic knife that cuts anything as easily as tofu."
So I'm going to slice along the hole offset.
Around the valve hole, I cut like this.
One more thing. Relative to the hub flange,
↑I'll represent nupoke like this, and
↑anti-nupoke like this.
And if I were to unfold the previous wheel into a flat diagram,
↑In Italian lacing, it would look like this.
Red is right nupoke, blue is left nupoke.
The notches at the four corners are where the valve hole was.
If you read the diagram precisely, this would be 8H with 2 spokes of nupoke and anti-nupoke paired,
but since this is a conceptual diagram to understand force distribution,
don't worry about whether this wheel could actually be built.
And further, keeping only nupoke.
↑In JIS lacing, it would look like this.
And further, keeping only nupoke.
↑As a side note, "JIS is JIS even when flipped" can also be expressed like this.
And "braking on the rim side" and
"twisting the freewheel body forward with the rear wheel" amount to,
Today I'm talking about nupoke.
Not spoke, but nupoke.
When you search Google for it,
it shows "Did you mean: spoke"
So it's clear there's no common homonym for this word.
Which makes sense, because this is my own made-up term.
First, a note: In my diagrams and reference photos, unless otherwise stated,
the direction of travel is toward the right side of the image.
When building a wheel, you thread spokes through the hub flanges,
In the case where you thread spokes from the inside of the hub outward,
↑This state will be called nupoke in this blog from now on.
It's just tedious to write "spoke threaded from inside" every time.
Similarly, when threading spokes from the outside of the hub inward,
↑This state will be called anti-nupoke from now on.
I could call it reverse-nupoke, but anti-nupoke is easier to type on a keyboard.
Broadly speaking, normal wheels have two types of lacing patterns.
When you lace spokes so they don't cross from the hub center, the spokes appear radial,
so this is called radial lacing.
I suspect the earliest spoke wheels were probably radial laced,
but radial lacing has both merits and demerits (I'll go into detail later since this is getting long),
and until the late 1980s when materials and structures appeared that could overcome these,
wheels were predominantly tangent laced (like the wheel shown in the photo above).
In tangent lacing, the spokes threaded through the hub flanges alternate between nupoke and anti-nupoke (except for special two-spoke patterns).
When I diagram the two spokes coming from adjacent holes in the hub flanges
that extend in non-intersecting directions,
it looks like this, and
because this direction is close to a tangent line (tangent) to the circle,
this lacing pattern is called tangent lacing.
As mentioned at the start,
from here on I'll discuss everything with the right side as the direction of travel.
With spokes all tangled up, it's hard to see clearly, so
I'm going to keep just the four spokes with red nipples fully visible in the photo above
to make it easier to understand.
A normal wheel has these four spokes as one group,
and if there are six such groups it's 24H, seven groups is 28H, eight groups is 32H, and so on.
But before that . . .
I prepared colored spokes. I'll thread these as nupoke.
Red is nupoke from my perspective in front,
blue is nupoke from my perspective in back, and I'll thread them through the hub.
↑When the rear two of the four spokes relative to the direction of travel are nupoke,
that's Italian lacing.
↑I flipped it from the previous state.
Now the nupoke becomes the front two spokes relative to the direction of travel.
This is reverse Italian lacing.
↑In contrast, when the front and rear two spokes relative to the direction of travel are nupoke,
that's JIS lacing.
The red nupoke is the same as Italian lacing,
but the blue nupoke is opposite.
↑With JIS lacing, flipping it doesn't change the positional relationship of the nupoke.
Whether nupoke extends forward or backward relative to the direction of travel
is extremely important.
For a 16H tangent-laced wheel, if I diagram only the nupoke,
with front nupoke in red and back nupoke in blue,
in Italian lacing it looks like this:
In JIS it's like this. To belabor the point,
in both Italian and JIS, the positional relationship of red nupoke is the same.
↑It's extending in this direction.
This, where nupoke points backward when viewing the top half of the wheel,
is very important for the rear wheel.
I'll call this the "porcupine direction."
↑So I prepared a "right-nupoke-only wheel."
To reiterate, whether Italian or JIS, the nupoke from the right flange is in the porcupine direction.
↓
While riding, the freewheel body has a sprocket on it, the chain wraps around it,
and when you push down on the pedal via the crank arm from above, intense twisting force is applied forward.
Expressing that with a hand, it looks like this:
Since holding the freewheel part doesn't show the hub flange,
I'll hold the hub body and twist it forward.
To see how the force is applied, spoke tension is slack—
they're not tight.
↓
You can see the spokes get further cinched and tightened.
In an actual properly-built state they don't deform this much,
but this shows they're constantly under this kind of stress.
So what happens if right nupoke is in the anti-porcupine direction?
This happens with reverse Italian or reverse JIS lacing, but . . .
↓
The spoke tension goes in the loosening direction rather than the tightening direction.
If the tire isn't inflated, the spokes would stick out from the rim.
When you crank hard on the pedals, which direction would better transmit
that force to the outside of the rear wheel?
Obviously the case where right nupoke is in the porcupine direction.
You might think "that's obvious," but I've seen complete bikes from manufacturers
with hand-built wheels in reverse Italian lacing, and
complete wheels with straight-pull spoke hubs where the rightmost spoke
is in the anti-porcupine direction, so
you should pay close attention to these things.
I'll go into specific examples later since this is already long.
Say there's a rubber cylinder with evenly-spaced marks . . .
If you twist the end, the twist deformation increases closer to where the twist is applied.
Imagining this on a rear hub,
↓
It works out like this. The spoke taking the most force from pedaling force is the right nupoke,
so right nupoke should be in the porcupine direction.
Next is the case with rim brakes.
A wheel with nupoke in porcupine direction is rolling.
From that state, I applied hard brakes.
The rim's rotation stopped instantly, but
the hub didn't stop instantly, so the spokes
got further cinched in the porcupine direction.
That phenomenon occurs. With Italian lacing, this gets cinched equally on both sides,
but with JIS lacing, the stress on the left side spokes relative to the direction of travel
goes in the tension-loosening direction.
This asymmetry is what I find unpleasant.
Let me look at this differently.
With a low-profile rim, the nipple holes alternate left and right.
↑When assembled, it looks like this.
Actually, this wheel is a Campagnolo Neutron, and
as shown in the rim decal, Neutron uses internal nipples.
The external-nipple Neutron is . . .
I'll cut this short and won't detail it later either.
So, a rim with hole offset,
assembled like this.
↑This is a blue marker, but for our purposes,
imagine it's "a magic knife that cuts anything as easily as tofu."
So I'm going to slice along the hole offset.
Around the valve hole, I cut like this.
One more thing. Relative to the hub flange,
↑I'll represent nupoke like this, and
↑anti-nupoke like this.
And if I were to unfold the previous wheel into a flat diagram,
↑In Italian lacing, it would look like this.
Red is right nupoke, blue is left nupoke.
The notches at the four corners are where the valve hole was.
If you read the diagram precisely, this would be 8H with 2 spokes of nupoke and anti-nupoke paired,
but since this is a conceptual diagram to understand force distribution,
don't worry about whether this wheel could actually be built.
And further, keeping only nupoke.
↑In JIS lacing, it would look like this.
And further, keeping only nupoke.
↑As a side note, "JIS is JIS even when flipped" can also be expressed like this.
And "braking on the rim side" and
"twisting the freewheel body forward with the rear wheel" amount to,
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