Another day, another wheel (etc.).
A customer dropped off the front wheel from a Nomulab Wheel No. 5.
It's built with a Novatech hub 20H, CX-RAY, four-cross Italian pattern,
but the brake zone is severely worn, so they want the rim replaced.
It's hard to see in the photo, but the brake zone is dished inward,
and when you scratch it with your fingernail, it's rough enough to make a scraping sound.
The spots next to the valve hole are in dark blue,
and the spots next to the rim joint on the opposite side have gold aluminum nipples.
Moving the rim over to the new hub...
Since there's no compelling reason to reuse the nipples, I'm replacing them all,
but the customer wanted gold nipples opposite the valve hole and
red nipples at the valve hole phase, so that's what I did.
There was aluminum corrosion or fine sand packed into the spoke holes,
which was on the verge of seizing. In cases like this, it's actually easier to
completely disassemble rather than just transferring the rim—that way you can properly clean the threads and apply threadlocker.
But this time I went with the transfer method.
All
built
up.
Separately, another shop left a 24H front wheel built with an XR200 rim for inspection,
and I deliberately didn't touch it.
It's an Evo hub (not Evo Lite) 24H, all CX-RAY, four-cross, reverse JIS pattern.
The rim holes are correctly dished with no mistakes,
perfectly centered with almost no lateral runout, but it has unacceptable radial runout,
and the spoke tension is about 80% of what I'd use for H1ST—it's slack.
They could still be tightened, and arguably should be.
The reverse JIS pattern doesn't seem to have any deep reasoning behind it.
By the way, just because H1ST is at 80% doesn't mean 2nd ST is also 80%.
The conversion chart between 1st ST and 2nd ST isn't a straight line.
This also ties into the "beaker theory" discussion.
Since this slack front wheel was never ridden after assembly,
I asked the customer to try it out. If they feel the stiffness is lacking,
they can come back later and I'll tighten it up and correct the radial runout.
But if they find it feels just as stiff as the front wheel I built,
then the difference in spoke tension from that 20% variance would be meaningless.
My front wheel has four fewer spokes,
but I'm confident that the stiffness feel is noticeably different.
Alternatively, the shop that built the 24H front wheel can
reverse-engineer or nitpick my wheel as they see fit.
They're welcome to correct the radial runout and tension it to similar levels too.
Since it has four more spokes than a 20H, the spoke tension can be slightly lower and that's fine.
The rim probably doesn't have a Mindrill treatment,
but since it has silver aluminum nipples,
it's not impossible to get it to the same tension depending on how you go about it.
I wrote "another day, another wheel (etc.)" at the start,
but there's an internal rule that a simple rim transfer doesn't count toward today's quota,
so I need to build another complete wheel.
A customer dropped off the front wheel from a Nomulab Wheel No. 5.
It's built with a Novatech hub 20H, CX-RAY, four-cross Italian pattern,
but the brake zone is severely worn, so they want the rim replaced.
It's hard to see in the photo, but the brake zone is dished inward,
and when you scratch it with your fingernail, it's rough enough to make a scraping sound.
The spots next to the valve hole are in dark blue,
and the spots next to the rim joint on the opposite side have gold aluminum nipples.
Moving the rim over to the new hub...
Since there's no compelling reason to reuse the nipples, I'm replacing them all,
but the customer wanted gold nipples opposite the valve hole and
red nipples at the valve hole phase, so that's what I did.
There was aluminum corrosion or fine sand packed into the spoke holes,
which was on the verge of seizing. In cases like this, it's actually easier to
completely disassemble rather than just transferring the rim—that way you can properly clean the threads and apply threadlocker.
But this time I went with the transfer method.
All
built
up.
Separately, another shop left a 24H front wheel built with an XR200 rim for inspection,
and I deliberately didn't touch it.
It's an Evo hub (not Evo Lite) 24H, all CX-RAY, four-cross, reverse JIS pattern.
The rim holes are correctly dished with no mistakes,
perfectly centered with almost no lateral runout, but it has unacceptable radial runout,
and the spoke tension is about 80% of what I'd use for H1ST—it's slack.
They could still be tightened, and arguably should be.
The reverse JIS pattern doesn't seem to have any deep reasoning behind it.
By the way, just because H1ST is at 80% doesn't mean 2nd ST is also 80%.
The conversion chart between 1st ST and 2nd ST isn't a straight line.
This also ties into the "beaker theory" discussion.
Since this slack front wheel was never ridden after assembly,
I asked the customer to try it out. If they feel the stiffness is lacking,
they can come back later and I'll tighten it up and correct the radial runout.
But if they find it feels just as stiff as the front wheel I built,
then the difference in spoke tension from that 20% variance would be meaningless.
My front wheel has four fewer spokes,
but I'm confident that the stiffness feel is noticeably different.
Alternatively, the shop that built the 24H front wheel can
reverse-engineer or nitpick my wheel as they see fit.
They're welcome to correct the radial runout and tension it to similar levels too.
Since it has four more spokes than a 20H, the spoke tension can be slightly lower and that's fine.
The rim probably doesn't have a Mindrill treatment,
but since it has silver aluminum nipples,
it's not impossible to get it to the same tension depending on how you go about it.
I wrote "another day, another wheel (etc.)" at the start,
but there's an internal rule that a simple rim transfer doesn't count toward today's quota,
so I need to build another complete wheel.