The Roval C38 that I reassembled the other day was picked up by the customer, so I
hurriedly finished the remaining spoke lacing.
While doing that, I heard an interesting story:
The original C38 had both wheels perfectly centered, and
the tangential-laced side of the front wheel was tensioned right to the edge of deformation to gain spoke tension on the radial-laced side, which was...
「because I'd trued it up in the past when it came as a terribly sloppy out-of-the-box wheel」
Yeah, I had a feeling about that when I was writing the previous article.
So retightening alone didn't solve the problem,
and it ended up needing a complete respoke.
And just to clarify for the record:
I'm not saying "Roval = equally terrible across the board."
Well, it's mostly true that they're terrible, but.
Their CLX32 rim brake wheelset is actually pretty decent,
and this C38's front wheel in particular uses equal-spoke-count lacing with radial lacing on the non-rotor side—
a pre-2000s approach that's theoretically worse than their other models.
Finally, let me tie up why this article's category is
「Spoke Topics」.
With DT's Competition Race spokes,
the spoke weight ratio came to about 73.3%.
If sample sizes increase, we might see some variation within the sub-1% range,
but we can call it roughly 73%.
If you use Competition Race on the freehub side and CX Sprint on the non-freehub side,
you'll get different diameters on each side—worth remembering.
While doing that, I heard an interesting story:
The original C38 had both wheels perfectly centered, and
the tangential-laced side of the front wheel was tensioned right to the edge of deformation to gain spoke tension on the radial-laced side, which was...
「because I'd trued it up in the past when it came as a terribly sloppy out-of-the-box wheel」
Yeah, I had a feeling about that when I was writing the previous article.
So retightening alone didn't solve the problem,
and it ended up needing a complete respoke.
And just to clarify for the record:
I'm not saying "Roval = equally terrible across the board."
Their CLX32 rim brake wheelset is actually pretty decent,
and this C38's front wheel in particular uses equal-spoke-count lacing with radial lacing on the non-rotor side—
a pre-2000s approach that's theoretically worse than their other models.
Finally, let me tie up why this article's category is
「Spoke Topics」.
With DT's Competition Race spokes,
the spoke weight ratio came to about 73.3%.
If sample sizes increase, we might see some variation within the sub-1% range,
but we can call it roughly 73%.
If you use Competition Race on the freehub side and CX Sprint on the non-freehub side,
you'll get different diameters on each side—worth remembering.