It's wheels again today (and so on).
A customer brought me a rear wheel built with a carbon WO rim where the outermost decorative carbon finish looks Colima-ish.
It's a Meccanico (Italian component manufacturer) rim.
It's a 24H hub with 44 Italian lacing pattern, built with Pillar square aero spokes.
The non-drive side was
loose, apparently.
Actually, compared to hand-built wheels or wheel-like knock-offs that are much looser, it's not abnormally loose.
According to the customer, compared to a rear wheel I built in the past (which itself was a rebuild of someone else's hand-built wheel), it's definitely looser.
I see. Foffofffoffoff. (V)0¥0(V) ←Baltanseijin (alien character)
I was making notes for a rebuild using a black semi-competition nipple, but these Pillar square aero spokes can be used as the counterpart to CX-RAY's left-right different-diameter lacing.
So I thought, what if I change just the non-drive side from Pillar's 4-spoke lacing to CX-RAY's 6-spoke lacing...
Separately today, I was truing a rear wheel that's a 24H 40-spoke lacing with a Meccanico red hub, black CX-RAY, and red nipples, and it turned out that looseness in the radially-laced non-drive side nipples were the main cause of the lateral runout. Radial lacing gets loose more easily than tangential lacing.
That said, there's center offset on the side that hasn't been used with age, and when I checked the nipple tightening margin just to be safe, the spoke length was flush with the nipple slot.
By my standards it's short, but it's not necessarily bad.
I've seen similarly short lengths on complete wheels too.
Starting from the valve hole when viewed from the drive side and going counterclockwise, I carefully disassembled the wheel, leaving the last 4 spokes without loosening any nipples at all.
I can see the nipple threads inside the rim visually, but I can't photograph them well.
From the left side of this bundle, I'll pull the spokes out from the rim and photograph the thread condition.
↑Non-drive side
↑Drive side
↑Non-drive side
↑Drive side
The drive side is about flush with the slot, but the non-drive side is clearly short.
With a hub with equal-diameter flanges on both sides and equal-spoke lacing, the spoke length difference between sides would be around 2mm.
So when only the non-drive side is short, you can often say "they used the same spoke length on both sides and cut corners," but this rear hub has pretty pronounced high-low flanges, so the non-drive spokes are actually longer, meaning no corners were cut.
It's simply a calculation error.
So here's what I thought:
"I could cut the non-drive side spoke and use it on the drive side to rebuild with the nipple end flush," but in that case I'd use up the Pillar spokes I have, which I can't restock.
Drive side is already at the slot even in the original state, and the tension was just a bit before the limit, so if rebuilt, it wouldn't reach the nipple end but would advance the threads more than the original state.
Accepting both clarity and murkiness, thinking of maintainability as part of performance, and weighing major and minor factors, I decided that the best approach would be to "reuse the drive-side spokes and return the non-drive side spokes to the customer as spare parts for the drive side."
So I removed the spokes from just the non-drive side.
↑Left in the image is the drive-side spoke neck, right is the non-drive spoke neck.
I cleaned the hub without removing any of the drive-side spokes.
You can apply threadlock even without the spokes separated.
I also cleaned the 12 spokes from the original non-drive side.
Even without consciously dividing them into two groups of six,
distinguishing original drive-side from original non-drive spokes is easy.
The bundle in the upper part of the image is the non-drive spokes.
Even when using as spare parts, it's better to match this point if possible.
It's built.
24H hub, black Pillar square aero / black CX-RAY 46-spoke lacing with bracing.
I determined the non-drive side spoke length not by calculating from rim inside diameter or hub dimensions, but from experiential spoke length differences.
For example, the spoke length difference between radial and 4-spoke lacing on a front wheel 24H is usually about 10mm as long as the hub dimensions aren't extreme.
In this case, I took the length difference between 4-spoke and 6-spoke lacing, plus a correction value for when the obviously short spoke was extended to flush rather than slot, and added that to the original length to figure out the spoke length.
The result was that after rebuild, the drive side ended up between slot and flush, and the non-drive side at flush and flush-tight.
If I'd skipped the documentation photography steps, loosened the drive side evenly from its original state until about three threads were visible, applied threadlock to the threads, and then carefully disassembled only the non-drive spokes, I could have rebuilt more easily. But if I did that, it would become a "rim relocation" job and I couldn't keep it within the "wheels again today (and so on)" frame, so I completely disassembled it.
(Though I didn't remove the drive-side spokes from the hub, once the hub and rim are separated that's fine.)
One more thing: I didn't like the original 14mm black aluminum nipples, so I switched to DT's 12mm black aluminum nipples. If I replaced them one by one clockwise, it would also become a rim relocation job, so I chose complete disassembly.
A customer brought me a rear wheel built with a carbon WO rim where the outermost decorative carbon finish looks Colima-ish.
It's a Meccanico (Italian component manufacturer) rim.
It's a 24H hub with 44 Italian lacing pattern, built with Pillar square aero spokes.
The non-drive side was
loose, apparently.
Actually, compared to hand-built wheels or wheel-like knock-offs that are much looser, it's not abnormally loose.
According to the customer, compared to a rear wheel I built in the past (which itself was a rebuild of someone else's hand-built wheel), it's definitely looser.
I see. Foffofffoffoff. (V)0¥0(V) ←Baltanseijin (alien character)
I was making notes for a rebuild using a black semi-competition nipple, but these Pillar square aero spokes can be used as the counterpart to CX-RAY's left-right different-diameter lacing.
So I thought, what if I change just the non-drive side from Pillar's 4-spoke lacing to CX-RAY's 6-spoke lacing...
Separately today, I was truing a rear wheel that's a 24H 40-spoke lacing with a Meccanico red hub, black CX-RAY, and red nipples, and it turned out that looseness in the radially-laced non-drive side nipples were the main cause of the lateral runout. Radial lacing gets loose more easily than tangential lacing.
That said, there's center offset on the side that hasn't been used with age, and when I checked the nipple tightening margin just to be safe, the spoke length was flush with the nipple slot.
By my standards it's short, but it's not necessarily bad.
I've seen similarly short lengths on complete wheels too.
Starting from the valve hole when viewed from the drive side and going counterclockwise, I carefully disassembled the wheel, leaving the last 4 spokes without loosening any nipples at all.
I can see the nipple threads inside the rim visually, but I can't photograph them well.
From the left side of this bundle, I'll pull the spokes out from the rim and photograph the thread condition.
↑Non-drive side
↑Drive side
↑Non-drive side
↑Drive side
The drive side is about flush with the slot, but the non-drive side is clearly short.
With a hub with equal-diameter flanges on both sides and equal-spoke lacing, the spoke length difference between sides would be around 2mm.
So when only the non-drive side is short, you can often say "they used the same spoke length on both sides and cut corners," but this rear hub has pretty pronounced high-low flanges, so the non-drive spokes are actually longer, meaning no corners were cut.
It's simply a calculation error.
So here's what I thought:
"I could cut the non-drive side spoke and use it on the drive side to rebuild with the nipple end flush," but in that case I'd use up the Pillar spokes I have, which I can't restock.
Drive side is already at the slot even in the original state, and the tension was just a bit before the limit, so if rebuilt, it wouldn't reach the nipple end but would advance the threads more than the original state.
Accepting both clarity and murkiness, thinking of maintainability as part of performance, and weighing major and minor factors, I decided that the best approach would be to "reuse the drive-side spokes and return the non-drive side spokes to the customer as spare parts for the drive side."
So I removed the spokes from just the non-drive side.
↑Left in the image is the drive-side spoke neck, right is the non-drive spoke neck.
I cleaned the hub without removing any of the drive-side spokes.
You can apply threadlock even without the spokes separated.
I also cleaned the 12 spokes from the original non-drive side.
Even without consciously dividing them into two groups of six,
distinguishing original drive-side from original non-drive spokes is easy.
The bundle in the upper part of the image is the non-drive spokes.
Even when using as spare parts, it's better to match this point if possible.
It's built.
24H hub, black Pillar square aero / black CX-RAY 46-spoke lacing with bracing.
I determined the non-drive side spoke length not by calculating from rim inside diameter or hub dimensions, but from experiential spoke length differences.
For example, the spoke length difference between radial and 4-spoke lacing on a front wheel 24H is usually about 10mm as long as the hub dimensions aren't extreme.
In this case, I took the length difference between 4-spoke and 6-spoke lacing, plus a correction value for when the obviously short spoke was extended to flush rather than slot, and added that to the original length to figure out the spoke length.
The result was that after rebuild, the drive side ended up between slot and flush, and the non-drive side at flush and flush-tight.
If I'd skipped the documentation photography steps, loosened the drive side evenly from its original state until about three threads were visible, applied threadlock to the threads, and then carefully disassembled only the non-drive spokes, I could have rebuilt more easily. But if I did that, it would become a "rim relocation" job and I couldn't keep it within the "wheels again today (and so on)" frame, so I completely disassembled it.
(Though I didn't remove the drive-side spokes from the hub, once the hub and rim are separated that's fine.)
One more thing: I didn't like the original 14mm black aluminum nipples, so I switched to DT's 12mm black aluminum nipples. If I replaced them one by one clockwise, it would also become a rim relocation job, so I chose complete disassembly.