A customer dropped off a RACE wheel for service.
You might not be able to tell from just the title, but
these are Bontrager wheels.
The front wheel was totally out of true.
The centering was off by an amount you wouldn't normally see from the factory, and there was radial runout too.
For a moment I thought the rim itself was bent,
but I figured out the cause right away.
Someone who can't true wheels properly—probably an amateur—
botched the adjustment and gave up on it.
（The customer isn't the original owner of this wheel, so
they don't know anything about its service history.）
Especially the amount of center offset was way beyond what would come from the manufacturer.
Since the rim itself had no problems, I patiently worked on correcting it
and got it looking pretty clean.
Actually, I'd say there isn't a new off-the-shelf example of this same wheel
with better precision than this one ended up with.
The rim's good accuracy meant I could push the correction further than usual.
The rear wheel had just a little bit of center offset,
so it was straightforward to fix.
It's quite an offset rim,
but for some reason there's a fair amount of difference in spoke deformation left and right.
So I'm not entirely sure if the offset rim is doing its job, but
it must be helping,
so if it weren't an offset rim, there would probably be even more left-right difference.
Edit: I wrote radial lacing on the non-freewheel side, but
it's actually tangential lacing on both sides. Thanks for the correction in the comments.
The rim hole on the outer edge corresponding to the spoke on the freewheel side
was drilled pretty tight,
but since the rim tape was thick and the width matched,
there wasn't anything risky about it. Though it is pulled in a bit.
You might not be able to tell from just the title, but
these are Bontrager wheels.
The front wheel was totally out of true.
The centering was off by an amount you wouldn't normally see from the factory, and there was radial runout too.
For a moment I thought the rim itself was bent,
but I figured out the cause right away.
Someone who can't true wheels properly—probably an amateur—
botched the adjustment and gave up on it.
（The customer isn't the original owner of this wheel, so
they don't know anything about its service history.）
Especially the amount of center offset was way beyond what would come from the manufacturer.
Since the rim itself had no problems, I patiently worked on correcting it
and got it looking pretty clean.
Actually, I'd say there isn't a new off-the-shelf example of this same wheel
with better precision than this one ended up with.
The rim's good accuracy meant I could push the correction further than usual.
The rear wheel had just a little bit of center offset,
so it was straightforward to fix.
It's quite an offset rim,
but for some reason there's a fair amount of difference in spoke deformation left and right.
So I'm not entirely sure if the offset rim is doing its job, but
it must be helping,
so if it weren't an offset rim, there would probably be even more left-right difference.
Edit: I wrote radial lacing on the non-freewheel side, but
it's actually tangential lacing on both sides. Thanks for the correction in the comments.
The rim hole on the outer edge corresponding to the spoke on the freewheel side
was drilled pretty tight,
but since the rim tape was thick and the width matched,
there wasn't anything risky about it. Though it is pulled in a bit.