A customer dropped off a Racing Zero rear wheel with me.
When a friend who "can handle wheels" did the truing check,
it turned out the wheel was indeed out of true.
One spoke is missing, but I told the customer beforehand
"I'm going to intentionally break this one" before snapping it.
Either a proper spoke wrench wasn't used,
or it wasn't used correctly—
the spoke near the nipple is twisted,
and since I didn't want the customer to think I broke it by touching it,
I warned them first: "This is twisted here, and it'll probably snap next time I turn it"
and broke it.
To replace the nipple, I cut it here so it's a length I can recover.
The phase of this spoke was where the most pronounced runout was,
and in other areas, while the spokes weren't twisted,
there were many nipples that were stripped.
This customer really went at just this nipple hard—
it's so stripped that it needs replacing regardless of whether we replace the spoke.
The marking on the spoke head is "three vertical lines".
Besides the black versions like Racing Zero and Shamal Ultra,
the Silver Racing 1, Red Racing Zero,
and the Gold and Titanium Gray of the first and second generation Shamal Ultra
all come in the same length, so I mentioned this to the customer,
and they asked for gold, so I became a style thief.
I wanted the single different-colored spoke next to the valve hole,
so I removed the black spoke there and replaced it with the gold one,
and used the removed black spoke in the damaged spoke's location—
they happened to be right next to each other, so it turned out to be a nice visual marker like this.
When a friend who "can handle wheels" did the truing check,
it turned out the wheel was indeed out of true.
One spoke is missing, but I told the customer beforehand
"I'm going to intentionally break this one" before snapping it.
Either a proper spoke wrench wasn't used,
or it wasn't used correctly—
the spoke near the nipple is twisted,
and since I didn't want the customer to think I broke it by touching it,
I warned them first: "This is twisted here, and it'll probably snap next time I turn it"
and broke it.
To replace the nipple, I cut it here so it's a length I can recover.
The phase of this spoke was where the most pronounced runout was,
and in other areas, while the spokes weren't twisted,
there were many nipples that were stripped.
This customer really went at just this nipple hard—
it's so stripped that it needs replacing regardless of whether we replace the spoke.
The marking on the spoke head is "three vertical lines".
Besides the black versions like Racing Zero and Shamal Ultra,
the Silver Racing 1, Red Racing Zero,
and the Gold and Titanium Gray of the first and second generation Shamal Ultra
all come in the same length, so I mentioned this to the customer,
and they asked for gold, so I became a style thief.
I wanted the single different-colored spoke next to the valve hole,
so I removed the black spoke there and replaced it with the gold one,
and used the removed black spoke in the damaged spoke's location—
they happened to be right next to each other, so it turned out to be a nice visual marker like this.