Another day with wheels (et cetera).
Continuing from yesterday. I'm rebuilding my partner's rear wheel too.
Since I changed the front wheel to silver spokes, I'm doing the rear wheel in silver spokes as well.
Yesterday I mentioned that besides the nopea 38 with 38mm rim depth, there's also a 50—
and this rear wheel turned out to be that one.
The spokes, like the front wheel, are MAC key-slot black aero on both sides,
laced 2-cross on both sides with a Novatech variable-pitch hub, 24H.
Variable-pitch hubs show up on ENVE carbon hubs and such too, but
as you can see, when you build them 4-cross on both sides with this hub design,
it naturally ends up close to 6-cross without you doing anything about it.
However, when you're building a 24H rear wheel with off-the-shelf parts,
there are people who'll 4-cross the whole thing without a shred of doubt in a lifetime,
or worse yet, radial-lace the non-freewheel side—
those folks won't understand what this is about anyway.
I think manufacturers should just take the extra step and make a rear hub
where even if the builder doesn't notice, the freewheel side has evenly-spaced holes
so it naturally approximates 6-cross—but I've never seen one like that.
The reverse exists though: the Bartim or Tni Star Hub (→here).
With the Star Hub, the main focus is on ultra-high-low flange geometry,
so the design philosophy is different anyway.
Variable-pitch flanges lose their effect when hole count increases or the flange gets smaller,
so for example, even if you put a variable-pitch flange on just the non-freewheel side of an Evo Lite hub,
it doesn't mean much
(dimensionally, 24H might work but 32H seems impossible from the start).
With a large flange, the variable-pitch flange actually has some purpose.
In fact, ENVE's rear hub has a large enough non-freewheel flange
despite being high-low (→here).
Before disassembly, I shined a light inside the rim
and confirmed, like with the front wheel, that the spokes are abnormally short,
so I left the final crossing—one pair on each side, four spokes total—completely untightened as usual.
↑Freewheel side
↑Non-freewheel side
↑Freewheel side
↑Non-freewheel side
This is... hmm, not just abnormally short—
maybe they actually did THAT...
↑Here I've laid out those four spokes side by side.
Top two are freewheel side, bottom two are non-freewheel side.
The topmost and bottommost spokes have upright necks
and paint is chipped on the inside of the elbow, so they're originally inpokes.
To compare lengths, I lined them up at the neck and looked at the thread end—
↑It came out like this.
They're using the same length spokes for both sides—a real shortcut.
Otherwise the freewheel side should clearly be about 2mm shorter,
but it's obviously not.
The position where the aero butting begins is nearly identical too,
so these are definitely the same-length spokes.
The slight difference in length is just individual variation.
Since these spokes are right around 100% specific gravity,
there's no waviness stretching them out
(if anything stretched, the higher-tension freewheel spokes would be longer).
Even if the spoke length is the same on both sides,
if the freewheel side length lines up flush with the nipple end face,
the non-freewheel side will fall a little short of the slot.
That length for the non-freewheel side would already be wrong,
and this is far shorter than that, so it's out of the question.
I don't feel even the slightest hesitation about judging based on just these two wheels.
Based on these two wheels alone, I'm calling it: VCYCLE's wheel assembly is crap, total crap!
I'll say it as many times as needed. First, fix your spoke lengths, you idiots.
Actually, Prime and Token typically do much better in this regard.
The customer's request for the rebuild was
to change the hub to an Evo Lite and build it half-strong 6-cross.
About the half-strong part—
the non-freewheel side CX-RAY runs so tight it's picky about rims.
For example, it's possible on Nomu Lab Wheel #1, and I've done it several times,
but on #5 I'd recommend against it.
This rim isn't offset, but
with an offset rim in half-strong, I'd definitely say no.
So with half-champagne giving us plenty of stiffness anyway,
I got them to agree to half-champagne instead.
Built it.
Evo Lite hub 24H, half-champagne 6-cross.
I'll wire them up later.
The customer had been using this wheel
with TUFO's proprietary "tubular-clincher" tires,
so there was no rim tape on it to begin with.
There was a balance weight stuck on the rim,
but it was just on the outer perimeter, the rim tape surface.
After peeling that off, I weighed the rim.
Taking into account that it's a WO wide rim, it's pretty light,
and the feel when building the wheel didn't give the impression
of a weak rim with low limit tension.
Just incredible sloppiness is what's killing this wheel.
I don't plan to post the specific rim weight here.
I mean, why should I have to tell you?
↑ Ugh, this guy's got an attitude
S-o-rry for the wait!
My images are drawn fresh every time, but—
This time, I'm reusing the one from before—
an unbelievable shortcut!
Anyway, moving on—
Front rim weight!
Rear rim weight!
↑Knock it off!
Continuing from yesterday. I'm rebuilding my partner's rear wheel too.
Since I changed the front wheel to silver spokes, I'm doing the rear wheel in silver spokes as well.
Yesterday I mentioned that besides the nopea 38 with 38mm rim depth, there's also a 50—
and this rear wheel turned out to be that one.
The spokes, like the front wheel, are MAC key-slot black aero on both sides,
laced 2-cross on both sides with a Novatech variable-pitch hub, 24H.
Variable-pitch hubs show up on ENVE carbon hubs and such too, but
as you can see, when you build them 4-cross on both sides with this hub design,
it naturally ends up close to 6-cross without you doing anything about it.
However, when you're building a 24H rear wheel with off-the-shelf parts,
there are people who'll 4-cross the whole thing without a shred of doubt in a lifetime,
or worse yet, radial-lace the non-freewheel side—
those folks won't understand what this is about anyway.
I think manufacturers should just take the extra step and make a rear hub
where even if the builder doesn't notice, the freewheel side has evenly-spaced holes
so it naturally approximates 6-cross—but I've never seen one like that.
The reverse exists though: the Bartim or Tni Star Hub (→here).
With the Star Hub, the main focus is on ultra-high-low flange geometry,
so the design philosophy is different anyway.
Variable-pitch flanges lose their effect when hole count increases or the flange gets smaller,
so for example, even if you put a variable-pitch flange on just the non-freewheel side of an Evo Lite hub,
it doesn't mean much
(dimensionally, 24H might work but 32H seems impossible from the start).
With a large flange, the variable-pitch flange actually has some purpose.
In fact, ENVE's rear hub has a large enough non-freewheel flange
despite being high-low (→here).
Before disassembly, I shined a light inside the rim
and confirmed, like with the front wheel, that the spokes are abnormally short,
so I left the final crossing—one pair on each side, four spokes total—completely untightened as usual.
↑Freewheel side
↑Non-freewheel side
↑Freewheel side
↑Non-freewheel side
This is... hmm, not just abnormally short—
maybe they actually did THAT...
↑Here I've laid out those four spokes side by side.
Top two are freewheel side, bottom two are non-freewheel side.
The topmost and bottommost spokes have upright necks
and paint is chipped on the inside of the elbow, so they're originally inpokes.
To compare lengths, I lined them up at the neck and looked at the thread end—
↑It came out like this.
They're using the same length spokes for both sides—a real shortcut.
Otherwise the freewheel side should clearly be about 2mm shorter,
but it's obviously not.
The position where the aero butting begins is nearly identical too,
so these are definitely the same-length spokes.
The slight difference in length is just individual variation.
Since these spokes are right around 100% specific gravity,
there's no waviness stretching them out
(if anything stretched, the higher-tension freewheel spokes would be longer).
Even if the spoke length is the same on both sides,
if the freewheel side length lines up flush with the nipple end face,
the non-freewheel side will fall a little short of the slot.
That length for the non-freewheel side would already be wrong,
and this is far shorter than that, so it's out of the question.
I don't feel even the slightest hesitation about judging based on just these two wheels.
Based on these two wheels alone, I'm calling it: VCYCLE's wheel assembly is crap, total crap!
I'll say it as many times as needed. First, fix your spoke lengths, you idiots.
Actually, Prime and Token typically do much better in this regard.
The customer's request for the rebuild was
to change the hub to an Evo Lite and build it half-strong 6-cross.
About the half-strong part—
the non-freewheel side CX-RAY runs so tight it's picky about rims.
For example, it's possible on Nomu Lab Wheel #1, and I've done it several times,
but on #5 I'd recommend against it.
This rim isn't offset, but
with an offset rim in half-strong, I'd definitely say no.
So with half-champagne giving us plenty of stiffness anyway,
I got them to agree to half-champagne instead.
Built it.
Evo Lite hub 24H, half-champagne 6-cross.
I'll wire them up later.
The customer had been using this wheel
with TUFO's proprietary "tubular-clincher" tires,
so there was no rim tape on it to begin with.
There was a balance weight stuck on the rim,
but it was just on the outer perimeter, the rim tape surface.
After peeling that off, I weighed the rim.
Taking into account that it's a WO wide rim, it's pretty light,
and the feel when building the wheel didn't give the impression
of a weak rim with low limit tension.
Just incredible sloppiness is what's killing this wheel.
I don't plan to post the specific rim weight here.
I mean, why should I have to tell you?
↑ Ugh, this guy's got an attitude
S-o-rry for the wait!
My images are drawn fresh every time, but—
This time, I'm reusing the one from before—
an unbelievable shortcut!
Anyway, moving on—
Front rim weight!
Rear rim weight!
↑Knock it off!