Today, another wheel build (and so on). But first.
This is my personal Neutron Ultra front wheel, but I've replaced the internal nipples with universal nipples and arranged them in colors based on a color wheel so they shimmer rainbow-like when spinning in sunlight.
The image above shows the actual arrangement I use on my Neutron.
Besides the color wheel, I also referenced the rainbow diamond Rolex Daytona with baguette-cut diamonds around the bezel.
That too traces back to the color wheel as its source, but I've learned from experience that to make the nipple color changes look beautiful, you shouldn't arrange them exactly as a pure color wheel. It works better to use more light colors and emphasize the red and blue zones.
The green nipples are a fairly dark shade, so if aluminum valve caps with that yellow-green anodized color exist, swapping them in would be better.
Reading the colors clockwise from the image: purple 2, red 5, orange 3, gold 3, green 3, turquoise 4, blue 2. That's 22 nipples total for the 22-hole Neutron, so when the rim has different hole counts like 20H, 24H, or 28H, you need to adjust the color distribution.
Red and blue nipples can come in darker shades depending on manufacturer and era, but these reflect sunlight more like black nipples, so you shouldn't use them. Among the colors I actually use, purple and green are the "darker" ones, so compared to a pure color wheel, you should reduce their overall proportion.
This is also my personal rim—I bought a Stan's Grail CB7 rim quite a while ago.
I don't have time to build my own wheels.
Stan's
Grail
The current models have CB7 as the model suffix for carbon rims and MK3 for aluminum rims.
The CB7 is a hookless rim with no bead hook. As marked on the rim itself, it can only be used with tubeless or tubeless-ready tires (though you can use it with tubes if the tire specs allow—I'll write about this when I build a wheel with this rim).
Stan's rims are designed with relatively shallow hooks even on hooked models, and the deflection is minimal (outside ETRTO spec requirements), so their road/gravel Grail MK3, older Grail, and discontinued Alpha 340 rims have seen instances where tires came off during riding when punctured with conventional tires. So Stan's rims should be treated as tubeless-only even if they're not hookless.
The weight is listed as 300g, and measured like this:
Stan's main website has separate stickers for the CB7, but Japanese distributors currently only stock the MK3 version. Regardless, I've already bought the Grail MK3 stickers to replace them eventually.
That was all just the preamble. Today, another wheel build (and so on).
I'm building front and rear wheels for a customer's MTB using Crest MK3 rims. The front hub hasn't arrived yet, so today I'm building the rear wheel.
Stan's
Crest
MK3.
The original sticker color is white/red, and there are also 7 separate sticker color options: yellow, orange, blue (light blue), green (yellow-green), black (more like dark gray), and silver.
Only the Grail MK3 (even on the main site) doesn't have the original white/red in its sticker lineup—it only has 6 colors. So if you peel off the Grail MK3 stickers, you can't restore it to factory spec. That's important to note.
The main website shows 6 color sticker options for the road/gravel Grail MK3, and 7 colors for the MTB rims: Crest MK3, Arch MK3, Flow MK3, Sentry MK3, and Baron MK3. Grail MK3 only comes in 700C, but the MTB rims have both 29" and 27.5" options. Of these, Japanese distributors currently only stock three: Grail MK3, Crest MK3 (29"), and Flow MK3 (27.5").
For example, there are no Arch MK3 stickers in any size, and the Flow MK3 29" isn't available either. Also, the Crest MK3 comes in a 26" size, but there are no 26" stickers anywhere, even on Stan's main site.
This customer knows about what I'm planning to do with the Grail CB7 rims and wanted to do the same thing first, so I ordered 4 bright-colored stickers from the Crest MK3 lineup.
↑Compared to the GRAIL stickers, the CREST lettering is larger.
I was planning to treat the original white/red as red (in color wheel terms) and cover the entire rim with stickers, but with 5 colors on a 28-hole rim, each color gets 5/28 = 5.6 holes' worth of space. Looking at the length of the original CREST sticker in the image above,
↑there's no room to also fit this Stan's NoTubes sticker.
I've always thought—don't stick stickers right at the rim edge, it makes wheel building a pain! But now that I'm the one placing them, I understand a bit why builders do it.
I haven't placed it right at the edge, but positioned it at about the same location as the original white/red CREST.
Applied.
The hub is an M9000-series XTR with BOOST spec, model FH-M9010-B. "OLD 148" doesn't mean 148 years old (and this isn't my first time using that joke)—it means an over-locknut-dimension of 148mm.
From my experience, the reason—or more accurately, the reason customers are forced to choose the XTR hub, which costs several times more than the one-tier-down XT, is that 28H is only available in XTR. If XT had a 28H version, we'd probably use that for this wheel. And this rear hub is no longer in Shimano's stock. The 28H front hub (BOOST 15×110mm) has a bit of inventory left. What a joke. Cut production way too early.
Current M9100-series XTR only comes in microspline spec, and there's no 11-speed sprocket in microspline for this customer's needs. So for a 28H hub cheaper than Chris King or DT, this was basically the only option (Industry Nine's also gotten weirdly pricey lately, and Tni only makes 32H).
Shimano MTB rear hubs have no compatibility via parts swaps between 142mm and 148mm widths.
But on the flip side, this lack of flexibility is actually good wheel design. In the table above, the flange width is 57.4mm for the 142mm hub and 63.4mm for the 148mm hub. That's a 6mm difference—the entire 6mm wider over-locknut-dimension goes to the flange width.
Let me also write out the method for calculating left and right flange widths. The 6.6mm shown in the table is what Shimano calls "offset," and the left and right flange widths are calculated by adding and subtracting this from half the flange width. Specifically, half of 63.4mm is 31.7mm, then 31.7mm plus 6.6mm equals 38.3mm for the left flange width, and 31.7mm minus 6.6mm equals 25.1mm for the right flange width. I think they should just list these numbers directly in the table instead of making people calculate, and actually, older catalogs did it that way.
Shimano hubs get less flexible with BOOST spec, but in return the flange width is properly wide. However, with rear hubs that use drop-in axle ends or complete pre-built wheels, the flange width doesn't change at all even if the over-locknut-dimension changes. So the "stiffness increase" from BOOSTing doesn't contribute much to the wheel itself. Whether versatility is part of performance is something people differ on.
Built.
FH-M9010-B 28H, half-comp JIS lacing. Spoke tension adjustment comes later.
When using the dishing gauge, I try to find opposite sides without sticker if possible, so only one side picks up the sticker thickness, but
with this rim, that's impossible, so I'm measuring with "stickers on both sides."
When the wheel spins, the sticker gradient cycles through visibly, creating a nice effect, though I couldn't capture it well photographically. The white CREST would be better if it were a true red from a color-wheel perspective, but with the other four colors matching well, this looks good as-is.
Update: Still couldn't get a good shot.
For the nipple colors, I matched them somewhat to the sticker colors, so they deviate from the pure color-wheel proportions. I made everything directly under the orange sticker orange.
Under the blue sticker, in the range shown above, the left three are turquoise and the right one is blue.
Since green is a dark color that doesn't reflect light well, I increased the blue zone, and one blue slipped in under the green sticker.
Weighing all factors including the sticker arrangement, for this 28H rim I actually reduced the purple from two (on the 22H) down to just one. If this rim still had the original white/red stickers and I was doing a rainbow arrangement, I'd have two or three purples.
This is my personal Neutron Ultra front wheel, but I've replaced the internal nipples with universal nipples and arranged them in colors based on a color wheel so they shimmer rainbow-like when spinning in sunlight.
The image above shows the actual arrangement I use on my Neutron.
Besides the color wheel, I also referenced the rainbow diamond Rolex Daytona with baguette-cut diamonds around the bezel.
That too traces back to the color wheel as its source, but I've learned from experience that to make the nipple color changes look beautiful, you shouldn't arrange them exactly as a pure color wheel. It works better to use more light colors and emphasize the red and blue zones.
The green nipples are a fairly dark shade, so if aluminum valve caps with that yellow-green anodized color exist, swapping them in would be better.
Reading the colors clockwise from the image: purple 2, red 5, orange 3, gold 3, green 3, turquoise 4, blue 2. That's 22 nipples total for the 22-hole Neutron, so when the rim has different hole counts like 20H, 24H, or 28H, you need to adjust the color distribution.
Red and blue nipples can come in darker shades depending on manufacturer and era, but these reflect sunlight more like black nipples, so you shouldn't use them. Among the colors I actually use, purple and green are the "darker" ones, so compared to a pure color wheel, you should reduce their overall proportion.
This is also my personal rim—I bought a Stan's Grail CB7 rim quite a while ago.
Stan's
Grail
The current models have CB7 as the model suffix for carbon rims and MK3 for aluminum rims.
The CB7 is a hookless rim with no bead hook. As marked on the rim itself, it can only be used with tubeless or tubeless-ready tires (though you can use it with tubes if the tire specs allow—I'll write about this when I build a wheel with this rim).
Stan's rims are designed with relatively shallow hooks even on hooked models, and the deflection is minimal (outside ETRTO spec requirements), so their road/gravel Grail MK3, older Grail, and discontinued Alpha 340 rims have seen instances where tires came off during riding when punctured with conventional tires. So Stan's rims should be treated as tubeless-only even if they're not hookless.
The weight is listed as 300g, and measured like this:
Stan's main website has separate stickers for the CB7, but Japanese distributors currently only stock the MK3 version. Regardless, I've already bought the Grail MK3 stickers to replace them eventually.
That was all just the preamble. Today, another wheel build (and so on).
I'm building front and rear wheels for a customer's MTB using Crest MK3 rims. The front hub hasn't arrived yet, so today I'm building the rear wheel.
Stan's
Crest
MK3.
The original sticker color is white/red, and there are also 7 separate sticker color options: yellow, orange, blue (light blue), green (yellow-green), black (more like dark gray), and silver.
Only the Grail MK3 (even on the main site) doesn't have the original white/red in its sticker lineup—it only has 6 colors. So if you peel off the Grail MK3 stickers, you can't restore it to factory spec. That's important to note.
The main website shows 6 color sticker options for the road/gravel Grail MK3, and 7 colors for the MTB rims: Crest MK3, Arch MK3, Flow MK3, Sentry MK3, and Baron MK3. Grail MK3 only comes in 700C, but the MTB rims have both 29" and 27.5" options. Of these, Japanese distributors currently only stock three: Grail MK3, Crest MK3 (29"), and Flow MK3 (27.5").
For example, there are no Arch MK3 stickers in any size, and the Flow MK3 29" isn't available either. Also, the Crest MK3 comes in a 26" size, but there are no 26" stickers anywhere, even on Stan's main site.
This customer knows about what I'm planning to do with the Grail CB7 rims and wanted to do the same thing first, so I ordered 4 bright-colored stickers from the Crest MK3 lineup.
↑Compared to the GRAIL stickers, the CREST lettering is larger.
I was planning to treat the original white/red as red (in color wheel terms) and cover the entire rim with stickers, but with 5 colors on a 28-hole rim, each color gets 5/28 = 5.6 holes' worth of space. Looking at the length of the original CREST sticker in the image above,
↑there's no room to also fit this Stan's NoTubes sticker.
I've always thought—don't stick stickers right at the rim edge, it makes wheel building a pain! But now that I'm the one placing them, I understand a bit why builders do it.
I haven't placed it right at the edge, but positioned it at about the same location as the original white/red CREST.
Applied.
The hub is an M9000-series XTR with BOOST spec, model FH-M9010-B. "OLD 148" doesn't mean 148 years old (and this isn't my first time using that joke)—it means an over-locknut-dimension of 148mm.
From my experience, the reason—or more accurately, the reason customers are forced to choose the XTR hub, which costs several times more than the one-tier-down XT, is that 28H is only available in XTR. If XT had a 28H version, we'd probably use that for this wheel. And this rear hub is no longer in Shimano's stock. The 28H front hub (BOOST 15×110mm) has a bit of inventory left. What a joke. Cut production way too early.
Current M9100-series XTR only comes in microspline spec, and there's no 11-speed sprocket in microspline for this customer's needs. So for a 28H hub cheaper than Chris King or DT, this was basically the only option (Industry Nine's also gotten weirdly pricey lately, and Tni only makes 32H).
Shimano MTB rear hubs have no compatibility via parts swaps between 142mm and 148mm widths.
But on the flip side, this lack of flexibility is actually good wheel design. In the table above, the flange width is 57.4mm for the 142mm hub and 63.4mm for the 148mm hub. That's a 6mm difference—the entire 6mm wider over-locknut-dimension goes to the flange width.
Let me also write out the method for calculating left and right flange widths. The 6.6mm shown in the table is what Shimano calls "offset," and the left and right flange widths are calculated by adding and subtracting this from half the flange width. Specifically, half of 63.4mm is 31.7mm, then 31.7mm plus 6.6mm equals 38.3mm for the left flange width, and 31.7mm minus 6.6mm equals 25.1mm for the right flange width. I think they should just list these numbers directly in the table instead of making people calculate, and actually, older catalogs did it that way.
Shimano hubs get less flexible with BOOST spec, but in return the flange width is properly wide. However, with rear hubs that use drop-in axle ends or complete pre-built wheels, the flange width doesn't change at all even if the over-locknut-dimension changes. So the "stiffness increase" from BOOSTing doesn't contribute much to the wheel itself. Whether versatility is part of performance is something people differ on.
Built.
FH-M9010-B 28H, half-comp JIS lacing. Spoke tension adjustment comes later.
When using the dishing gauge, I try to find opposite sides without sticker if possible, so only one side picks up the sticker thickness, but
with this rim, that's impossible, so I'm measuring with "stickers on both sides."
When the wheel spins, the sticker gradient cycles through visibly, creating a nice effect, though I couldn't capture it well photographically. The white CREST would be better if it were a true red from a color-wheel perspective, but with the other four colors matching well, this looks good as-is.
Update: Still couldn't get a good shot.
For the nipple colors, I matched them somewhat to the sticker colors, so they deviate from the pure color-wheel proportions. I made everything directly under the orange sticker orange.
Under the blue sticker, in the range shown above, the left three are turquoise and the right one is blue.
Since green is a dark color that doesn't reflect light well, I increased the blue zone, and one blue slipped in under the green sticker.
Weighing all factors including the sticker arrangement, for this 28H rim I actually reduced the purple from two (on the 22H) down to just one. If this rim still had the original white/red stickers and I was doing a rainbow arrangement, I'd have two or three purples.