Another day, another wheel (abbreviated hereafter).
A customer brought in a carbon wheel for work.
It's a tubular rim that measures 49mm high in practice,
though the catalog spec might list it as 50mm high.
Black CX-RAY, 4-0 lacing pattern.
The customer wants it to feel much stiffer,
but with this spoke selection and lacing pattern, the freewheel-side spoke tension is already nearly maxed out, so there's not much I can do about it.
I disassembled it.
I fully loosened about half the wheel to release tension before cutting the spokes. The spokes and nipples in the image are from the half-side that I didn't loosen at all.
The freewheel-side spokes were clearly too long.
I thought maybe someone had lazily used the same length spokes for both sides,
but that's not it.
With 4-4 lacing, you'd normally subtract about 2mm from the non-freewheel side spoke length to get the freewheel side length, but this is 4-0 lacing.
It was just plain carelessness.
The spoke tension limit is listed as 140 kgf.
I said earlier that it was "nearly maxed out," but it wasn't actually built at 140 kgf.
The external nipple limit is lower than the rim's limit, so
before rebuilding, that was the effective ceiling.
(With internal nipples you could tension it a bit more.)
The hub rotation was grinding and rough,
so I replaced the non-freewheel side bearing in the hub body.
All built up.
Novatec F482 hub, 24H, half-comp 4-6 lacing with cross-lacing.
During the rebuild, I cleaned both the hub and rim.
I also did a full overhaul of the hub while I was replacing the bearings.
Going to silver spokes is the customer's request. For the front wheel too,
since it looked odd having just the front wheel with black spokes,
I'm rebuilding it from black CX-RAY to silver CX-RAY.
But I'm short on spokes.
So that'll have to wait for another day.
A customer brought in a carbon wheel for work.
It's a tubular rim that measures 49mm high in practice,
though the catalog spec might list it as 50mm high.
Black CX-RAY, 4-0 lacing pattern.
The customer wants it to feel much stiffer,
but with this spoke selection and lacing pattern, the freewheel-side spoke tension is already nearly maxed out, so there's not much I can do about it.
I disassembled it.
I fully loosened about half the wheel to release tension before cutting the spokes. The spokes and nipples in the image are from the half-side that I didn't loosen at all.
The freewheel-side spokes were clearly too long.
I thought maybe someone had lazily used the same length spokes for both sides,
but that's not it.
With 4-4 lacing, you'd normally subtract about 2mm from the non-freewheel side spoke length to get the freewheel side length, but this is 4-0 lacing.
It was just plain carelessness.
The spoke tension limit is listed as 140 kgf.
I said earlier that it was "nearly maxed out," but it wasn't actually built at 140 kgf.
The external nipple limit is lower than the rim's limit, so
before rebuilding, that was the effective ceiling.
(With internal nipples you could tension it a bit more.)
The hub rotation was grinding and rough,
so I replaced the non-freewheel side bearing in the hub body.
All built up.
Novatec F482 hub, 24H, half-comp 4-6 lacing with cross-lacing.
During the rebuild, I cleaned both the hub and rim.
I also did a full overhaul of the hub while I was replacing the bearings.
Going to silver spokes is the customer's request. For the front wheel too,
since it looked odd having just the front wheel with black spokes,
I'm rebuilding it from black CX-RAY to silver CX-RAY.
But I'm short on spokes.
So that'll have to wait for another day.