Wheels again today (and so on).
Continuing from yesterday. I'm also rebuilding my partner's rear wheel.
Since I changed the front wheel to silver spokes, I'll do the rear wheel in silver spokes too.
Yesterday I wrote that besides the nopea 38 with a 38mm rim depth, there's also a 50,
and that turned out to be the rear wheel.
The spokes are the same as the front wheel—mac essential slit black aero spokes on both sides,
built with a Novatech phase-pinch sparse-dense hole hub, 24H, 4-cross on both sides.
As for sparse-dense hole hubs, they also appear in things like ENVE carbon hubs,
but as you can see, when built with a 4-cross on both sides,
they naturally become closer to a 6-cross without anyone trying.
However, when building a 24H rear wheel with generic materials,
someone who's spent a lifetime doing 4-cross builds without question,
or worse yet, someone who actually radial-laces the non-drive side,
won't understand the point of this at all. I think manufacturers should go one step further and make
a rear hub with evenly-spaced hole flanges on the drive side only, so it naturally approaches
a 4-6 cross regardless of whether the builder notices or not,
but I've never seen one like that. The reverse exists, though—the Bartim or Tni star hub (→here).
With the star hub, the focus is on the ultra-high-low flange,
so the design philosophy is different.
With sparse-dense hole flanges, when the hole count increases or the flange gets smaller,
the effect of the sparse-dense hole element becomes less significant, so for instance
even if you put a sparse-dense hole flange only on the non-drive side of an Evolite hub,
it doesn't accomplish much
(dimensionally, 24H might work, but 32H probably won't).
With a large flange, the sparse-dense hole flange gains some meaning.
In fact, with ENVE's rear hub, despite being hi-lo flanged,
the non-drive side is also quite large-flanged (→here).
Before disassembling, I shined a light inside the rim and confirmed,
just like the front wheel, that the spokes were abnormally short,
so as usual I left the final cross—one pair on each side, four spokes total—completely loose.
↑Drive side
↑Non-drive side
↑Drive side
↑Non-drive side
This is... hmm, not just abnormally short,
maybe they're actually doing... that.
↑Here are those four spokes laid out together.
In the image, the top two are drive side, the bottom two are non-drive side.
The topmost and bottommost spokes have their necks standing up
and the paint inside the elbow is chipped—they're used spokes.
To compare lengths, I lined them up carefully at the neck and looked at the threaded end,
↑and got this.
They're cutting corners by using spokes of the same length on both sides.
Otherwise the drive side should be clearly about 2mm shorter,
but it's obviously not.
The aero-butted section also starts at nearly the same position,
so these are definitely the same length spokes.
The slight length differences are just individual variation.
These are spokes at about 100% spoke specific gravity, so there's no
wavy stretch happening (if anything stretched, the higher-tension
drive side spokes would be longer).
Even if spoke length is the same on both sides,
if the drive side length is flush with the nipple end face,
the non-drive side will be slightly short of the slot.
That length on the non-drive side would already be NG,
but this is far shorter than that, so it's completely unacceptable.
Judging from just these two wheels alone might be hasty—
except I feel absolutely no such hesitation. Based on these two wheels alone, I'll say it outright:
the wheel assembly from this brand called VCYCLE is shit, absolute shit!
I'll write it as many times as needed. First, fix the spoke lengths, you idiots.
Actually, with Prime and Token wheels in this range, it's considerably better.
For the rebuild, the customer's request was
to change the hub to an Evolite and build it half-strong 4-6 cross.
Regarding the half-strong part—
the non-drive side CX-RAY is so tight it's pinging, which limits rim selection.
For example, it's possible on noma lab wheel #1, and I've done it several times,
but on #5 I should avoid it.
This rim isn't offset, but if it were offset rim with half-strong, I'd definitely decline.
So I got permission to use half-champi instead, which provides sufficient stiffness.
Built.
Evolite hub 24H half-champi 4-6 cross build.
I'll do the truing later.
Since the customer had been using this wheel
with TUFO proprietary "tubular clincher" tires,
there was no rim tape on it to begin with.
There was a balance weight on the rim,
but it was stuck on the outer surface, the rim tape mounting area.
After removing that, I weighed the rim.
Considering it's a WO wide rim, it's quite light,
and the wheel build feel didn't give the impression of a weak rim with low limit tension.
Only the unbelievable shortcuts are what ruins this wheel.
I have no intention of writing the specific rim weight here.
I mean, why should I have to tell you?
↑yikes, this guy's got an attitude
Sorry for the wait!
I usually draw my images fresh each time, but
This time I'm committing the unbelievable shortcut of reusing the one from the other day!
Anyway,
front rim weight!
rear rim weight!
↑okay, stop already!
Continuing from yesterday. I'm also rebuilding my partner's rear wheel.
Since I changed the front wheel to silver spokes, I'll do the rear wheel in silver spokes too.
Yesterday I wrote that besides the nopea 38 with a 38mm rim depth, there's also a 50,
and that turned out to be the rear wheel.
The spokes are the same as the front wheel—mac essential slit black aero spokes on both sides,
built with a Novatech phase-pinch sparse-dense hole hub, 24H, 4-cross on both sides.
As for sparse-dense hole hubs, they also appear in things like ENVE carbon hubs,
but as you can see, when built with a 4-cross on both sides,
they naturally become closer to a 6-cross without anyone trying.
However, when building a 24H rear wheel with generic materials,
someone who's spent a lifetime doing 4-cross builds without question,
or worse yet, someone who actually radial-laces the non-drive side,
won't understand the point of this at all. I think manufacturers should go one step further and make
a rear hub with evenly-spaced hole flanges on the drive side only, so it naturally approaches
a 4-6 cross regardless of whether the builder notices or not,
but I've never seen one like that. The reverse exists, though—the Bartim or Tni star hub (→here).
With the star hub, the focus is on the ultra-high-low flange,
so the design philosophy is different.
With sparse-dense hole flanges, when the hole count increases or the flange gets smaller,
the effect of the sparse-dense hole element becomes less significant, so for instance
even if you put a sparse-dense hole flange only on the non-drive side of an Evolite hub,
it doesn't accomplish much
(dimensionally, 24H might work, but 32H probably won't).
With a large flange, the sparse-dense hole flange gains some meaning.
In fact, with ENVE's rear hub, despite being hi-lo flanged,
the non-drive side is also quite large-flanged (→here).
Before disassembling, I shined a light inside the rim and confirmed,
just like the front wheel, that the spokes were abnormally short,
so as usual I left the final cross—one pair on each side, four spokes total—completely loose.
↑Drive side
↑Non-drive side
↑Drive side
↑Non-drive side
This is... hmm, not just abnormally short,
maybe they're actually doing... that.
↑Here are those four spokes laid out together.
In the image, the top two are drive side, the bottom two are non-drive side.
The topmost and bottommost spokes have their necks standing up
and the paint inside the elbow is chipped—they're used spokes.
To compare lengths, I lined them up carefully at the neck and looked at the threaded end,
↑and got this.
They're cutting corners by using spokes of the same length on both sides.
Otherwise the drive side should be clearly about 2mm shorter,
but it's obviously not.
The aero-butted section also starts at nearly the same position,
so these are definitely the same length spokes.
The slight length differences are just individual variation.
These are spokes at about 100% spoke specific gravity, so there's no
wavy stretch happening (if anything stretched, the higher-tension
drive side spokes would be longer).
Even if spoke length is the same on both sides,
if the drive side length is flush with the nipple end face,
the non-drive side will be slightly short of the slot.
That length on the non-drive side would already be NG,
but this is far shorter than that, so it's completely unacceptable.
Judging from just these two wheels alone might be hasty—
except I feel absolutely no such hesitation. Based on these two wheels alone, I'll say it outright:
the wheel assembly from this brand called VCYCLE is shit, absolute shit!
I'll write it as many times as needed. First, fix the spoke lengths, you idiots.
Actually, with Prime and Token wheels in this range, it's considerably better.
For the rebuild, the customer's request was
to change the hub to an Evolite and build it half-strong 4-6 cross.
Regarding the half-strong part—
the non-drive side CX-RAY is so tight it's pinging, which limits rim selection.
For example, it's possible on noma lab wheel #1, and I've done it several times,
but on #5 I should avoid it.
This rim isn't offset, but if it were offset rim with half-strong, I'd definitely decline.
So I got permission to use half-champi instead, which provides sufficient stiffness.
Built.
Evolite hub 24H half-champi 4-6 cross build.
I'll do the truing later.
Since the customer had been using this wheel
with TUFO proprietary "tubular clincher" tires,
there was no rim tape on it to begin with.
There was a balance weight on the rim,
but it was stuck on the outer surface, the rim tape mounting area.
After removing that, I weighed the rim.
Considering it's a WO wide rim, it's quite light,
and the wheel build feel didn't give the impression of a weak rim with low limit tension.
Only the unbelievable shortcuts are what ruins this wheel.
I have no intention of writing the specific rim weight here.
I mean, why should I have to tell you?
↑yikes, this guy's got an attitude
Sorry for the wait!
I usually draw my images fresh each time, but
This time I'm committing the unbelievable shortcut of reusing the one from the other day!
Anyway,
front rim weight!
rear rim weight!
↑okay, stop already!