A customer brought in a Cosmic Carbon SL for repair.
As a temporary measure, round-section butted spokes had been installed as a replacement,
but I've removed them for this photo.
Apparently another shop told them "we can't source spokes for this model,"
but the customer seems to have interpreted that as "it's been discontinued,"
and it looks like that shop was pushing them in that direction too.
Come on—the Mavic wheels you're selling are parallel imports anyway.
Don't mislead customers by saying "we can't get it" when you mean "it's discontinued and unobtainable."
We don't stock Mavic parts here,
but as long as the customer provides the spokes, we can do the repair work.
The Cosmic Carbon uses size 13 nipple diameter at both the spoke head and threaded sections.
So it's built around 13-gauge spokes as the base.
This means among sports bike wheels,
it uses spokes with the maximum gauge weight.
13-gauge straight spokes are impossible to source even from aftermarket suppliers, so there's not much we can do about that.
But using butted spokes as a temporary patch job is not a good solution.
When even one spoke with significantly different gauge weight gets mixed in,
that particular rim hole ends up in a situation where
"if you match spoke tension, you can't eliminate radial runout,
and if you prioritize radial runout, spoke tension won't match the surrounding spokes."
I think 14-gauge plain spokes would have been better, at least,
but mixing in thinner spokes created some pretty bad radial runout.
After replacing the spokes,
as I spun the wheel on the truing stand, the customer watched from the side
getting excited saying "Wow!" each time the runout got better.
But honestly, it makes me embarrassed, so please stop. It's just routine work.
I also took in another pair of wheels,
but I didn't even bother taking photos of those or writing details about them.
If I wrote about how they charged 18,000 yen for labor and a full spoke kit
just to replace one or two spokes on both wheels,
it'd probably get too specific and point to which shop it was, so I can't mention it.
That said, the work itself was done right.
Perfect centering, completely true.
As a temporary measure, round-section butted spokes had been installed as a replacement,
but I've removed them for this photo.
Apparently another shop told them "we can't source spokes for this model,"
but the customer seems to have interpreted that as "it's been discontinued,"
and it looks like that shop was pushing them in that direction too.
Come on—the Mavic wheels you're selling are parallel imports anyway.
Don't mislead customers by saying "we can't get it" when you mean "it's discontinued and unobtainable."
We don't stock Mavic parts here,
but as long as the customer provides the spokes, we can do the repair work.
The Cosmic Carbon uses size 13 nipple diameter at both the spoke head and threaded sections.
So it's built around 13-gauge spokes as the base.
This means among sports bike wheels,
it uses spokes with the maximum gauge weight.
13-gauge straight spokes are impossible to source even from aftermarket suppliers, so there's not much we can do about that.
But using butted spokes as a temporary patch job is not a good solution.
When even one spoke with significantly different gauge weight gets mixed in,
that particular rim hole ends up in a situation where
"if you match spoke tension, you can't eliminate radial runout,
and if you prioritize radial runout, spoke tension won't match the surrounding spokes."
I think 14-gauge plain spokes would have been better, at least,
but mixing in thinner spokes created some pretty bad radial runout.
After replacing the spokes,
as I spun the wheel on the truing stand, the customer watched from the side
getting excited saying "Wow!" each time the runout got better.
But honestly, it makes me embarrassed, so please stop. It's just routine work.
I also took in another pair of wheels,
but I didn't even bother taking photos of those or writing details about them.
If I wrote about how they charged 18,000 yen for labor and a full spoke kit
just to replace one or two spokes on both wheels,
it'd probably get too specific and point to which shop it was, so I can't mention it.
That said, the work itself was done right.
Perfect centering, completely true.