A customer brought in a Reynolds DV46T front wheel for me to work on.
This is the partner wheel to the rear wheel I rebuilt the other day.
They asked me to do some truing work, but
it was in pretty rough shape.
Time-wise, it took more than building the front wheels on Nomu Lab Wheels No. 1 and No. 5.
When I started the truing work,
I found a spoke that was clearly bent.
I'm going to call this one "right" from now on.
I put a marking tape near the hub flange.
And separately, I found another bent spoke.
↑here
I put marking tape on it. I'm going to call this one "left".
↑The spoke with tape on the left side of the image is "left", and the one on the right is "right",
but this front wheel is built with DT black Aero Lite spokes
The spoke between "left" and "right" is a black CX-RAY
(Sapim brand, so there's no marking on the spoke head).
CX-RAY and Aero Lite have almost the same specific weight and dimensions,
so using CX-RAY as a replacement for Aero Lite repairs isn't a problem in itself,
but they only replaced one of these three spokes
and did some half-ass "truing" that only fixed the lateral runout,
resulting in radial runout appearing.
Probably what happened is that in some kind of catch accident,
multiple spokes got bent, and they only replaced the most obvious one (the one that was most bent)
and then just half-heartedly dealt with the rest.
Unfortunately, this can't really be called a proper fix.
↑From top to bottom in the image: "left", black CX-RAY, "right".
When I align them at the hub side
This is how it looks at the rim side.
The black CX-RAY is being reused,
but its spoke length was about 2mm longer than proper.
This is ridiculous all the way through.
So I was thinking I'd fix this by replacing spokes in these three holes...
The spoke to the left of "left" was deformed near the nipple and also had a twist.
I'm going to call this one "left-left".
The spoke to the left of "left-left" was also bent.
I'm going to call this one "left-left-left".
↑The spoke at the top of the image is "left-left", and the one at the bottom is "left-left-left".
"Left-left" appears almost straight at first glance, but
it's bent side-to-side near the nipple, and
there's a twist slightly inboard from there.
This twist is probably caused by the failed truing attempt.
"Left-left-left"
shows more deformation in the side-to-side direction
than in the front-to-back direction.
So I ended up replacing 5 spokes.
One of them is the original black CX-RAY, cut to the proper length.
The radial runout before the work was due to the lateral truing "only",
done while bent spokes were mixed in.
But after replacing the spokes, when I fine-tuned the lateral runout
using only the 5 new spoke nipples,
the radial runout got worse than it was before the work.
It looks like various adjustments were made to hide bent spokes.
From here on, I had to trace back the history and do careful "catch-up" work,
like solving a Rubik's Cube. This is difficult.
After I finished pursuing both the lateral and radial runout,
I applied the centering gauge and got the results in the image above.
I didn't check the initial center, so I don't know if it was off before the work.
The hub has serrated washers pressed into the ends,
and one of them had a crack.
Since I couldn't remove it by hand, there's no problem.
I got the center sorted.
Fixed it.
Of the 16-hole wheel's 8 spokes on one side, 5 of them—more than half—are now black CX-RAY.
This is the partner wheel to the rear wheel I rebuilt the other day.
They asked me to do some truing work, but
it was in pretty rough shape.
Time-wise, it took more than building the front wheels on Nomu Lab Wheels No. 1 and No. 5.
When I started the truing work,
I found a spoke that was clearly bent.
I'm going to call this one "right" from now on.
I put a marking tape near the hub flange.
And separately, I found another bent spoke.
↑here
I put marking tape on it. I'm going to call this one "left".
↑The spoke with tape on the left side of the image is "left", and the one on the right is "right",
but this front wheel is built with DT black Aero Lite spokes
The spoke between "left" and "right" is a black CX-RAY
(Sapim brand, so there's no marking on the spoke head).
CX-RAY and Aero Lite have almost the same specific weight and dimensions,
so using CX-RAY as a replacement for Aero Lite repairs isn't a problem in itself,
but they only replaced one of these three spokes
and did some half-ass "truing" that only fixed the lateral runout,
resulting in radial runout appearing.
Probably what happened is that in some kind of catch accident,
multiple spokes got bent, and they only replaced the most obvious one (the one that was most bent)
and then just half-heartedly dealt with the rest.
Unfortunately, this can't really be called a proper fix.
↑From top to bottom in the image: "left", black CX-RAY, "right".
When I align them at the hub side
This is how it looks at the rim side.
The black CX-RAY is being reused,
but its spoke length was about 2mm longer than proper.
This is ridiculous all the way through.
So I was thinking I'd fix this by replacing spokes in these three holes...
The spoke to the left of "left" was deformed near the nipple and also had a twist.
I'm going to call this one "left-left".
The spoke to the left of "left-left" was also bent.
I'm going to call this one "left-left-left".
↑The spoke at the top of the image is "left-left", and the one at the bottom is "left-left-left".
"Left-left" appears almost straight at first glance, but
it's bent side-to-side near the nipple, and
there's a twist slightly inboard from there.
This twist is probably caused by the failed truing attempt.
"Left-left-left"
shows more deformation in the side-to-side direction
than in the front-to-back direction.
So I ended up replacing 5 spokes.
One of them is the original black CX-RAY, cut to the proper length.
The radial runout before the work was due to the lateral truing "only",
done while bent spokes were mixed in.
But after replacing the spokes, when I fine-tuned the lateral runout
using only the 5 new spoke nipples,
the radial runout got worse than it was before the work.
It looks like various adjustments were made to hide bent spokes.
From here on, I had to trace back the history and do careful "catch-up" work,
like solving a Rubik's Cube. This is difficult.
After I finished pursuing both the lateral and radial runout,
I applied the centering gauge and got the results in the image above.
I didn't check the initial center, so I don't know if it was off before the work.
The hub has serrated washers pressed into the ends,
and one of them had a crack.
Since I couldn't remove it by hand, there's no problem.
I got the center sorted.
Fixed it.
Of the 16-hole wheel's 8 spokes on one side, 5 of them—more than half—are now black CX-RAY.