Currently, the DT wholesaler only stocks two types of spokes in regular inventory: Champion and Competition.
The manufacturer's website still lists Revolution, but only in the 14-gauge base version.
Aero Lite had a tendency to be cheaper at the previous wholesaler compared to the current one, but even then it was several tens of percent more expensive than CX-RAY spokes of the same weight class from other manufacturers, so there wasn't any particular reason to use it.
They came in four sizes: 300mm, 290mm, 280mm, and 270mm, with the plain section on the rim side extended to allow for 10mm cutting,
so the spec was to cut them to any desired length down to 260mm.
While that wasn't a problem in itself, frequent stockouts were another reason we couldn't adopt it as a standard spoke.
Plain spokes can be cut to any desired length, so if you don't mind using a spoke cutter,
you only need to stock the longest length.
If there's a particular length you use frequently, you can keep that in addition to the longest length,
(though this is about Competition, not Champion—
the freewheel side length for the Nomu Lab Wheel No. 5 24H rear wheel is used often, so we keep the exact length in stock).
As for Champion, only the 14-gauge silver and black in the manufacturer's longest length of 315mm
come in a sales unit of "500 pieces."
For all other spokes, Champion (14-gauge and 15-gauge) at 315mm comes in 100-piece units,
and all other sales units are 10-piece and 4-piece packages.
Regarding the per-spoke unit price for 14-gauge Champion,
if the 500-piece unit is 100%, silver is 152% for 100-piece units and 195% for 10-piece and 4-piece units.
For black, 100-piece units are 144% and 10-piece and 4-piece units are 175%.
If you have a use for them, there's no choice but to order 500-piece 14-gauge Champion spokes.
The black Champion 14-gauge 500-piece units were running low, so I restocked.
The silver Champion 14-gauge 500-piece unit was restocked a while back.
Aside from using left and right on fixed-gear rear wheels, it's only used for the freewheel side of semi-integrated spokes and for repairs on budget wheel models,
but even 500 pieces run out when you use them (naturally).
For spokes without nipples only, 14-gauge plain 315mm 500-piece units work out to approximately 4048g based on spoke weight calculation.
The box bottom is weak relative to the weight of the contents, and when you try to lift the box,
the bottom threatens to give way, so I reinforce it before use.
The black 500-piece unit I ordered this time was strapped with PP banding.
↑When you cut the band, marks are left on the box,
but the boxes in our stock don't have them, so this isn't the standard specification.
Now I understand why they used PP banding.
The box's glue has come undone.
It's clear that the weight of the contents is what caused the box to collapse.
↑This is the box that held the silver Champion 500-piece unit.
The darkening on the right end is where the spoke heads were. Same reason as Dad's pillow.
↑This is the box for this time's black Champion 500-piece unit.
Regardless of manufacturer, black spokes tend to have more residual oil on the surface than silver spokes,
and the box gets dirty for reasons other than spoke head contact.
For black spokes, this one is actually on the cleaner side. Among current products, the black CX Sprint,
and among discontinued items, Asahi's black aero spokes
shipped so oil-saturated that your hands would get dirty immediately.
The box is bursting, but it's still useful, so I reinforce it with tape and use it.
Separate from the 14-gauge Champion butted spokes, we recently started carrying 14-gauge Champion straight spokes.
These come only in the longest length, in 100-piece units.
Both the wholesaler's materials and the invoice say 315mm,
but they're actually 320mm.
↑black
↑silver
The spoke heads bear DT's stamp.
For 14-gauge plain straight spokes, there's also Sapim Leader supply in both silver and black,
but we'll be using these going forward as well.
↑These 100-piece DT boxes are extremely useful for managing irregular spokes,
but we've had an extremely hard time sourcing extra ones.
Competition comes in 10-piece bags, not boxes, and 14-gauge Champion comes in 500-piece boxes,
so we only end up with surplus boxes when we finish the 15-gauge Champion or 14-gauge Champion Straight 100-piece units.
I regret throwing out hundreds of Competition boxes back then.
Though I did keep some.
The boxes marked as 100-piece have been made shorter due to a spec change.
Previously, an equal number of nipples were included,
in the same box as DT's single nipple sales, packed deep in the spoke box.
About these "100-piece boxes" I've been mentioning—
Champion silver and black, and Competition silver came in 100-piece units with silver brass nipples
(Champion included silver brass even with black spokes),
while Competition black and Revolution silver and black came in 72-piece units with aluminum nipples matching the spoke color.
Since black Competition and Revolution have fewer pieces total, when you pick up a new box
it's noticeably lighter than a 100-piece unit.
The old silver Competition came with silver brass nipples, and black Competition came with black aluminum nipples.
Black spokes were more expensive, but accounting for the nipple spec difference,
they had the smallest price gap among spokes.
At the previous wholesaler's prices around 2013,
silver Competition 1 spoke + silver brass nipple 1 piece was 88 yen,
black Competition 1 spoke + black aluminum nipple 1 piece was 120 yen,
but with a nipple price difference of about 30 yen,
the spokes alone worked out to roughly the same price.
At current list prices excluding tax,
silver Competition 1 spoke + silver brass nipple 1 piece is 111 yen,
black Competition 1 spoke + black aluminum nipple 1 piece is 228 yen,
broken down as 98+13 yen and 170+58 yen respectively.
Man, they've gone up a lot.
Unrelated to DT, but Sapim Leader's current list price excluding tax is
37 yen per spoke for silver and 86 yen for black.
With nipples and cheap spokes, the painting cost is often higher than the product itself.
With CX-RAY, that's 360 yen for silver and 500 yen for black.
Proportionally, black isn't quite double the silver price, but at +140 yen per spoke, it's expensive.
With the 15-gauge aero spoke CX Super, silver is 760 yen and black is 900 yen.
Since the spoke itself is pricier, the proportion thins out, but at +140 yen per spoke, it's the same as CX-RAY.
With CX Sprint, silver is 280 yen and black is 300 yen.
Remarkably, it's only +20 yen per spoke—cheaper than the paint job on plain Leader spokes.
This raises two suspicions.
Either the price is mislabeled and black spokes alone will be raised, or both will go up but black's increase will be especially large.
Or else, could these be outsourced spokes from Pillar or somewhere?
The fact that black CX Sprint is particularly oil-saturated compared to other models
makes it hard to believe they're made at the same place as CX-RAY.
The box I called the 100-piece size, with titanium spokes like Titanium MMC (Metal Matrix Composite),
has an M-shaped divider inside and contains only 18 pieces per box,
and it's so light you worry there's anything inside at all.
In the image above, I've grouped the same length together, so there are over 18 pieces.
You can see marks on the spokes from where they were gripped during manufacturing when the threads were cut.
Actually, even with silver stainless, though hard to see, these marks are there.
For black spokes, since paint sits on the threads,
it looks like they grip the spoke and cut the threads, then paint it black afterward.
This is about DT spokes, though.
Sapim's CX-RAY shows a mix of cases with paint on the threads and cases without.
It's not that different lengths have different finishes; the image above shows spokes of the same length.
Since the length of the non-butted section is consistent, it doesn't really matter either way...
The manufacturer's website still lists Revolution, but only in the 14-gauge base version.
Aero Lite had a tendency to be cheaper at the previous wholesaler compared to the current one, but even then it was several tens of percent more expensive than CX-RAY spokes of the same weight class from other manufacturers, so there wasn't any particular reason to use it.
They came in four sizes: 300mm, 290mm, 280mm, and 270mm, with the plain section on the rim side extended to allow for 10mm cutting,
so the spec was to cut them to any desired length down to 260mm.
While that wasn't a problem in itself, frequent stockouts were another reason we couldn't adopt it as a standard spoke.
Plain spokes can be cut to any desired length, so if you don't mind using a spoke cutter,
you only need to stock the longest length.
If there's a particular length you use frequently, you can keep that in addition to the longest length,
(though this is about Competition, not Champion—
the freewheel side length for the Nomu Lab Wheel No. 5 24H rear wheel is used often, so we keep the exact length in stock).
As for Champion, only the 14-gauge silver and black in the manufacturer's longest length of 315mm
come in a sales unit of "500 pieces."
For all other spokes, Champion (14-gauge and 15-gauge) at 315mm comes in 100-piece units,
and all other sales units are 10-piece and 4-piece packages.
Regarding the per-spoke unit price for 14-gauge Champion,
if the 500-piece unit is 100%, silver is 152% for 100-piece units and 195% for 10-piece and 4-piece units.
For black, 100-piece units are 144% and 10-piece and 4-piece units are 175%.
If you have a use for them, there's no choice but to order 500-piece 14-gauge Champion spokes.
The black Champion 14-gauge 500-piece units were running low, so I restocked.
The silver Champion 14-gauge 500-piece unit was restocked a while back.
Aside from using left and right on fixed-gear rear wheels, it's only used for the freewheel side of semi-integrated spokes and for repairs on budget wheel models,
but even 500 pieces run out when you use them (naturally).
For spokes without nipples only, 14-gauge plain 315mm 500-piece units work out to approximately 4048g based on spoke weight calculation.
The box bottom is weak relative to the weight of the contents, and when you try to lift the box,
the bottom threatens to give way, so I reinforce it before use.
The black 500-piece unit I ordered this time was strapped with PP banding.
↑When you cut the band, marks are left on the box,
but the boxes in our stock don't have them, so this isn't the standard specification.
Now I understand why they used PP banding.
The box's glue has come undone.
It's clear that the weight of the contents is what caused the box to collapse.
↑This is the box that held the silver Champion 500-piece unit.
The darkening on the right end is where the spoke heads were. Same reason as Dad's pillow.
↑This is the box for this time's black Champion 500-piece unit.
Regardless of manufacturer, black spokes tend to have more residual oil on the surface than silver spokes,
and the box gets dirty for reasons other than spoke head contact.
For black spokes, this one is actually on the cleaner side. Among current products, the black CX Sprint,
and among discontinued items, Asahi's black aero spokes
shipped so oil-saturated that your hands would get dirty immediately.
The box is bursting, but it's still useful, so I reinforce it with tape and use it.
Separate from the 14-gauge Champion butted spokes, we recently started carrying 14-gauge Champion straight spokes.
These come only in the longest length, in 100-piece units.
Both the wholesaler's materials and the invoice say 315mm,
but they're actually 320mm.
↑black
↑silver
The spoke heads bear DT's stamp.
For 14-gauge plain straight spokes, there's also Sapim Leader supply in both silver and black,
but we'll be using these going forward as well.
↑These 100-piece DT boxes are extremely useful for managing irregular spokes,
but we've had an extremely hard time sourcing extra ones.
Competition comes in 10-piece bags, not boxes, and 14-gauge Champion comes in 500-piece boxes,
so we only end up with surplus boxes when we finish the 15-gauge Champion or 14-gauge Champion Straight 100-piece units.
I regret throwing out hundreds of Competition boxes back then.
Though I did keep some.
The boxes marked as 100-piece have been made shorter due to a spec change.
Previously, an equal number of nipples were included,
in the same box as DT's single nipple sales, packed deep in the spoke box.
About these "100-piece boxes" I've been mentioning—
Champion silver and black, and Competition silver came in 100-piece units with silver brass nipples
(Champion included silver brass even with black spokes),
while Competition black and Revolution silver and black came in 72-piece units with aluminum nipples matching the spoke color.
Since black Competition and Revolution have fewer pieces total, when you pick up a new box
it's noticeably lighter than a 100-piece unit.
The old silver Competition came with silver brass nipples, and black Competition came with black aluminum nipples.
Black spokes were more expensive, but accounting for the nipple spec difference,
they had the smallest price gap among spokes.
At the previous wholesaler's prices around 2013,
silver Competition 1 spoke + silver brass nipple 1 piece was 88 yen,
black Competition 1 spoke + black aluminum nipple 1 piece was 120 yen,
but with a nipple price difference of about 30 yen,
the spokes alone worked out to roughly the same price.
At current list prices excluding tax,
silver Competition 1 spoke + silver brass nipple 1 piece is 111 yen,
black Competition 1 spoke + black aluminum nipple 1 piece is 228 yen,
broken down as 98+13 yen and 170+58 yen respectively.
Man, they've gone up a lot.
Unrelated to DT, but Sapim Leader's current list price excluding tax is
37 yen per spoke for silver and 86 yen for black.
With nipples and cheap spokes, the painting cost is often higher than the product itself.
With CX-RAY, that's 360 yen for silver and 500 yen for black.
Proportionally, black isn't quite double the silver price, but at +140 yen per spoke, it's expensive.
With the 15-gauge aero spoke CX Super, silver is 760 yen and black is 900 yen.
Since the spoke itself is pricier, the proportion thins out, but at +140 yen per spoke, it's the same as CX-RAY.
With CX Sprint, silver is 280 yen and black is 300 yen.
Remarkably, it's only +20 yen per spoke—cheaper than the paint job on plain Leader spokes.
This raises two suspicions.
Either the price is mislabeled and black spokes alone will be raised, or both will go up but black's increase will be especially large.
Or else, could these be outsourced spokes from Pillar or somewhere?
The fact that black CX Sprint is particularly oil-saturated compared to other models
makes it hard to believe they're made at the same place as CX-RAY.
The box I called the 100-piece size, with titanium spokes like Titanium MMC (Metal Matrix Composite),
has an M-shaped divider inside and contains only 18 pieces per box,
and it's so light you worry there's anything inside at all.
In the image above, I've grouped the same length together, so there are over 18 pieces.
You can see marks on the spokes from where they were gripped during manufacturing when the threads were cut.
Actually, even with silver stainless, though hard to see, these marks are there.
For black spokes, since paint sits on the threads,
it looks like they grip the spoke and cut the threads, then paint it black afterward.
This is about DT spokes, though.
Sapim's CX-RAY shows a mix of cases with paint on the threads and cases without.
It's not that different lengths have different finishes; the image above shows spokes of the same length.
Since the length of the non-butted section is consistent, it doesn't really matter either way...