A customer brought in the front wheel of a Shamal Ultra (high-end racing wheel) for repair.
One spoke has snapped.
The customer is from another prefecture outside the Kansai region, and when they tried to have this repaired at a local shop, they were quoted about 10,000 yen. The retail price of this spoke is around 2,000 yen including tax, so that would mean about 8,000 yen in labor costs...
Either they wanted to sell the customer a new wheel, or they were using an inflated quote as a convenient excuse to turn down the job (though "if they're offering 10,000 yen, might as well take it"). Either way, that shop clearly isn't capable of doing this repair properly. The reason being that to get it "rideable" again from this state, they loosened the spokes adjacent to the broken one and left the wheel with massive radial runout and completely trashed.
If we're starting from the current state with the spoke broken, this should be a five-minute job at most. But fixing the mess that idiot created took considerably longer. Besides, you can't make a broken spoke rideable with temporary measures unless it's a 24-hole or higher steel spoke wheel. In the case of this front wheel, at 16 holes with extremely high tension, if you loosen both adjacent spokes enough to prevent spoke rub at 15 holes, you'll get massive radial runout in that section of the rim. In other words, the fact that someone thinks they can get it "more or less rideable" at 15 holes proves they don't understand wheels at all and have no business trying to repair them. Give me a break.
Fixed it.
One spoke has snapped.
The customer is from another prefecture outside the Kansai region, and when they tried to have this repaired at a local shop, they were quoted about 10,000 yen. The retail price of this spoke is around 2,000 yen including tax, so that would mean about 8,000 yen in labor costs...
Either they wanted to sell the customer a new wheel, or they were using an inflated quote as a convenient excuse to turn down the job (though "if they're offering 10,000 yen, might as well take it"). Either way, that shop clearly isn't capable of doing this repair properly. The reason being that to get it "rideable" again from this state, they loosened the spokes adjacent to the broken one and left the wheel with massive radial runout and completely trashed.
If we're starting from the current state with the spoke broken, this should be a five-minute job at most. But fixing the mess that idiot created took considerably longer. Besides, you can't make a broken spoke rideable with temporary measures unless it's a 24-hole or higher steel spoke wheel. In the case of this front wheel, at 16 holes with extremely high tension, if you loosen both adjacent spokes enough to prevent spoke rub at 15 holes, you'll get massive radial runout in that section of the rim. In other words, the fact that someone thinks they can get it "more or less rideable" at 15 holes proves they don't understand wheels at all and have no business trying to repair them. Give me a break.
Fixed it.