Wheels again today (and so on...).
I built the front wheel for Nomu Lab Wheel #6.
EvoLite hub 20H CX-RAY, radial spoke pattern.
Separately, just the other day I handed a Nomu Lab Wheel #6 rear wheel to a customer, and today I did a job replacing all six spokes in the porcupine direction after the chain dropped inside the low gear and damaged them.
But building this front wheel took less time than that rear wheel work.
There's one thing customers often ask me about that I can't answer right away, and it surprises them.
Actually, I can't immediately recall the finished weight of each Nomu Lab Wheel model.
I can certainly recall the rim weight immediately, but a wheel is just an object spinning its outer perimeter mass around,
so for me, only the rim weight and whether I've managed to build it stiffer matters.
I write about this once in a while, but stuff like "whether the front and rear wheels combined come in under 1200g or so"
is actually a pretty irrelevant metric.
(Just thought of it now—that's necessary for building complete bikes right at the 6.8kg limit.)
For this wheel, the only important information is "the 310g rim wheel," and beyond that, it's built as stiffly as possible
and ideally the stiffness would be equal to or better than Reynolds UL32 or Shimano C24TU or similar.
For example, Dura-Ace front hubs don't come in 20H, but if they did and I built with that,
this front wheel would end up in the 500g range.
That weight increase barely causes any nuisance to the spinning mass of the wheel.
Shimano has better hub durability under no-maintenance abuse compared to Tni,
so the weight increase can't be said to outright reduce performance.
But today a customer asked me "How much does the Nomu Lab Wheel #6 front wheel weigh?" so I measured it. Here's what I got.
I don't remember the wheel weight, but I can calculate it.
The estimated spoke weight derived from spoke specific gravity comes to 93.88g for 20 spokes, so 94g,
hub 60g, nipples 7g, rim 310g,
so the rough total comes to 471g.
I can get it fairly accurately this way, but without a calculator I can't compute it, so it takes time.
I built the front wheel for Nomu Lab Wheel #6.
EvoLite hub 20H CX-RAY, radial spoke pattern.
Separately, just the other day I handed a Nomu Lab Wheel #6 rear wheel to a customer, and today I did a job replacing all six spokes in the porcupine direction after the chain dropped inside the low gear and damaged them.
But building this front wheel took less time than that rear wheel work.
There's one thing customers often ask me about that I can't answer right away, and it surprises them.
Actually, I can't immediately recall the finished weight of each Nomu Lab Wheel model.
I can certainly recall the rim weight immediately, but a wheel is just an object spinning its outer perimeter mass around,
so for me, only the rim weight and whether I've managed to build it stiffer matters.
I write about this once in a while, but stuff like "whether the front and rear wheels combined come in under 1200g or so"
is actually a pretty irrelevant metric.
(Just thought of it now—that's necessary for building complete bikes right at the 6.8kg limit.)
For this wheel, the only important information is "the 310g rim wheel," and beyond that, it's built as stiffly as possible
and ideally the stiffness would be equal to or better than Reynolds UL32 or Shimano C24TU or similar.
For example, Dura-Ace front hubs don't come in 20H, but if they did and I built with that,
this front wheel would end up in the 500g range.
That weight increase barely causes any nuisance to the spinning mass of the wheel.
Shimano has better hub durability under no-maintenance abuse compared to Tni,
so the weight increase can't be said to outright reduce performance.
But today a customer asked me "How much does the Nomu Lab Wheel #6 front wheel weigh?" so I measured it. Here's what I got.
I don't remember the wheel weight, but I can calculate it.
The estimated spoke weight derived from spoke specific gravity comes to 93.88g for 20 spokes, so 94g,
hub 60g, nipples 7g, rim 310g,
so the rough total comes to 471g.
I can get it fairly accurately this way, but without a calculator I can't compute it, so it takes time.