Correction: The original title was "Shamal Mille," but that was incorrect so I've fixed it. The reason for the mistake was that the four replacement spokes mentioned in the article have the marking "──" (two horizontal lines), and these spokes first appeared as front spokes on the first model of the Shamal Mille. So "Shamal Mille, Shamal Mille..." got stuck in my head and I made the error. Thank you to the commenter who pointed this out.
A customer brought in a Racing Zero front wheel for repair.
They said the rear wheel was wobbling, but it's actually got almost no runout — just a slight rightward centering drift that comes with age. The problem is the front wheel (in the image above), which the customer wasn't even concerned about.
The customer isn't the original owner of this wheel and hadn't noticed, but the front wheel has perfect lateral runout correction with no centering issues. It's only the radial runout that's abnormally severe. At certain phases, the rim pulses visibly enough that you can see the eccentric rotation without even putting it on a truing stand. It's more than half the vertical width of the brake shoe, so getting the shoes set up properly in the first place is basically impossible. The reason this happened is that the spokes are bent, but they've been tensioned super tight and only the lateral runout has been trued to hide it. In cases like this, it's often amateur truing hack work, but this time the lateral truing and centering were done with extremely high precision. In a way, if someone can do this well, they should just replace the spokes and fix it properly.
From the image above, the spoke deformation was obvious, so I removed the hub-side catch.
↑This is the side with the bearing cone adjustment mechanism, so I'll call it the left side. Three spokes on the left side are clearly deformed in the front-to-back direction. Counting clockwise from the spoke at the left side of the image as spoke #1, I removed spokes #1, #2, and #4 from the flange, but I thought spoke #3 had no deformation.
As for that spoke #3, the round spoke shaft is hidden inside the nipple. That's not a normal appearance at all.
↑Here's the normal state at a different phase. At first, I thought spoke #3 had been repaired using spokes of different (longer) length, like front wheel spokes from old aluminum shaft hubs.
But when I removed it, spoke #3 turned out to have the same markings as spokes #1, #2, and #4. So the length is the same too.
I mentioned earlier that there was radial runout exceeding half the brake shoe width, but you can see from the comparison image of the round spoke shafts just how tight the nipples had been tightened to achieve that lateral runout-free appearance.
As for spoke #3, this one was bent in the left-right direction.
It straightened out.
In the end, I had to replace all four spokes — #1, #2, #3, and #4. Other nipples had been heavily adjusted too to maintain that lateral-runout-free appearance, and while I could imagine the procedure, the work was quite difficult. About half the wheel's circumference was barely touched, while the other half had been tightened like crazy.
↑Replaced spokes #1, #2, and #4
↑Replaced spoke #3
↑This is also the replaced spoke #3. Since left-right bending can be straightened more cleanly than front-back bending, I tried bending it back. The area that was most bent had hardened, and it's best not to reuse this spoke. If there were no spokes in stock, it might be a makeshift measure we could discuss with the customer, but it's right on the edge of acceptable.
A customer brought in a Racing Zero front wheel for repair.
They said the rear wheel was wobbling, but it's actually got almost no runout — just a slight rightward centering drift that comes with age. The problem is the front wheel (in the image above), which the customer wasn't even concerned about.
The customer isn't the original owner of this wheel and hadn't noticed, but the front wheel has perfect lateral runout correction with no centering issues. It's only the radial runout that's abnormally severe. At certain phases, the rim pulses visibly enough that you can see the eccentric rotation without even putting it on a truing stand. It's more than half the vertical width of the brake shoe, so getting the shoes set up properly in the first place is basically impossible. The reason this happened is that the spokes are bent, but they've been tensioned super tight and only the lateral runout has been trued to hide it. In cases like this, it's often amateur truing hack work, but this time the lateral truing and centering were done with extremely high precision. In a way, if someone can do this well, they should just replace the spokes and fix it properly.
From the image above, the spoke deformation was obvious, so I removed the hub-side catch.
↑This is the side with the bearing cone adjustment mechanism, so I'll call it the left side. Three spokes on the left side are clearly deformed in the front-to-back direction. Counting clockwise from the spoke at the left side of the image as spoke #1, I removed spokes #1, #2, and #4 from the flange, but I thought spoke #3 had no deformation.
As for that spoke #3, the round spoke shaft is hidden inside the nipple. That's not a normal appearance at all.
↑Here's the normal state at a different phase. At first, I thought spoke #3 had been repaired using spokes of different (longer) length, like front wheel spokes from old aluminum shaft hubs.
But when I removed it, spoke #3 turned out to have the same markings as spokes #1, #2, and #4. So the length is the same too.
I mentioned earlier that there was radial runout exceeding half the brake shoe width, but you can see from the comparison image of the round spoke shafts just how tight the nipples had been tightened to achieve that lateral runout-free appearance.
As for spoke #3, this one was bent in the left-right direction.
It straightened out.
In the end, I had to replace all four spokes — #1, #2, #3, and #4. Other nipples had been heavily adjusted too to maintain that lateral-runout-free appearance, and while I could imagine the procedure, the work was quite difficult. About half the wheel's circumference was barely touched, while the other half had been tightened like crazy.
↑Replaced spokes #1, #2, and #4
↑Replaced spoke #3
↑This is also the replaced spoke #3. Since left-right bending can be straightened more cleanly than front-back bending, I tried bending it back. The area that was most bent had hardened, and it's best not to reuse this spoke. If there were no spokes in stock, it might be a makeshift measure we could discuss with the customer, but it's right on the edge of acceptable.