Another wheel day (et cetera).
A customer brought in a wheelset built with an Alpine-brand rim—actually a wheel I'd rebuilt for them in the past.
Originally it came with a Kinlin hub, pretty much equivalent to American Classic,
but the front hub bearings kept dying quickly,
and the rear hub had narrow flanges with no lateral stiffness
(partly a lacing issue too), so it was touching the brake shoes.
I'd already swapped both out for Novatec 291/482 hubs in a previous rebuild.
This time it was a spoke breakage repair, but the rim's brake zone was pretty worn,
so we decided to rebuild it with a Nomu Lab Wheel No. 5 rim.
When swapping between two radial-laced rims, the new setup requires spokes about 2mm longer,
so spoke reuse isn't possible.
In the reverse scenario—if the old CX-RAY spokes were uncut—reuse would be fine.
Built it up.
Since we were going to get new spokes anyway, I consulted with the customer and went with tangent lacing.
CX-RAY, four-cross Italian pattern.
The customer basically wanted silver aluminum nipples,
but the two nipples flanking the valve hole in blue aluminum,
and the two nipples flanking the rim seam on the opposite side in gold aluminum. That's what they wanted, so that's what I did.
Next, the rear wheel.
All CX-RAY in half-comp, with red aluminum nipples converted to match the front wheel pattern.
Built it up.
The freebody and hub shell look unusually clean compared to before the rebuild—not just from washing, but because I replaced the left and right bearings on both hubs.
Only the dual bearings inside the freebody survived intact; everything else was grinding away.
If we'd done the front wheel rebuild in radial lacing, I could've reused 12 of the old spokes from the drive-side and used them among the 20 front spokes—I'd offered that to the customer beforehand.
But they preferred a fresh swap, so those 12 drive-side spokes ended up scrapped.
If doing an outpoke radial build, reusing 6 of the 12 old inpoke spokes as outpokes isn't really a great idea either.
The nipple setup is the same as the front wheel.
A customer brought in a wheelset built with an Alpine-brand rim—actually a wheel I'd rebuilt for them in the past.
Originally it came with a Kinlin hub, pretty much equivalent to American Classic,
but the front hub bearings kept dying quickly,
and the rear hub had narrow flanges with no lateral stiffness
(partly a lacing issue too), so it was touching the brake shoes.
I'd already swapped both out for Novatec 291/482 hubs in a previous rebuild.
This time it was a spoke breakage repair, but the rim's brake zone was pretty worn,
so we decided to rebuild it with a Nomu Lab Wheel No. 5 rim.
When swapping between two radial-laced rims, the new setup requires spokes about 2mm longer,
so spoke reuse isn't possible.
In the reverse scenario—if the old CX-RAY spokes were uncut—reuse would be fine.
Built it up.
Since we were going to get new spokes anyway, I consulted with the customer and went with tangent lacing.
CX-RAY, four-cross Italian pattern.
The customer basically wanted silver aluminum nipples,
but the two nipples flanking the valve hole in blue aluminum,
and the two nipples flanking the rim seam on the opposite side in gold aluminum. That's what they wanted, so that's what I did.
Next, the rear wheel.
All CX-RAY in half-comp, with red aluminum nipples converted to match the front wheel pattern.
Built it up.
The freebody and hub shell look unusually clean compared to before the rebuild—not just from washing, but because I replaced the left and right bearings on both hubs.
Only the dual bearings inside the freebody survived intact; everything else was grinding away.
If we'd done the front wheel rebuild in radial lacing, I could've reused 12 of the old spokes from the drive-side and used them among the 20 front spokes—I'd offered that to the customer beforehand.
But they preferred a fresh swap, so those 12 drive-side spokes ended up scrapped.
If doing an outpoke radial build, reusing 6 of the 12 old inpoke spokes as outpokes isn't really a great idea either.
The nipple setup is the same as the front wheel.