A customer brought in a wheel built with an AL22W rim for inspection.
Starting with the rear wheel.
The hub is from the BITEX brand and built to roughly semi-competition four-cross lacing.
When I call something "wasting a Chris King,"
it doesn't just mean building a crappy wheel with an expensive Chris King hub
and stealing money for such work—
I limit that term to the work of one specific shop.
This is a wheel built there.
Those guys would never come up with semi-competition four-cross lacing on their own,
so this is, charitably speaking, a generic Nomu Lab wheel knockoff,
or less charitably, a Nomu Lab wheel imitation.
The reason it ended up as semi-competition four-cross lacing equivalent
was the customer's request.
By "equivalent," I mean the freewheel-side comp on the rear came from the shop's stock,
and the aero spokes—same dimensions as the Shimano CX-RAY for the front left and right
and the rear non-freewheel side—aren't Sapim CX-RAY but rather mac spokes,
because those were the customer's own parts.
I mean, bringing a Nomu Lab wheel knockoff to our shop for inspection
takes some guts, but well, that's fine.
For the record, I'm not angry. I don't have feelings of like or dislike about this sort of thing,
but honestly, I find it pretty amusing.
If I wrote about things like the sticker on the rim visible in the photo
and the backstory of the customer-supplied spokes,
the customer wondered whether that shop—the one wasting Chris Kings—
would recognize itself when reading this.
Apparently, they don't mind if it does.
There's some center offset, but apparently that's intentional.
The reason is that under load, the rim shifts (which is actually true),
so they offset the center in anticipation of that.
Since the amount differs between tubeless and tubed setups (also true),
it was originally set up for tubeless mode
but is now being run in tubed mode,
so they went back and deliberately re-offset it to tubed mode.
As for me, on my own rear wheel, I offset the rim toward the non-freewheel side
by about the thickness of a sheet of paper for a different reason,
but I didn't do that for this customer's rear wheel.
Achieving perfect center under load
is impossible, as I've written before.
So when I build a wheel, I aim for perfect center on the wheel itself.
Campagnolo and Fulcrum clearly do the same.
Mavic rear wheels almost invariably
show the rim shifted toward the non-freewheel side,
and I've wondered if that was intentional,
but even rim brake front wheels, which don't need any center offset at all,
frequently show shifts.
While I can't explain the non-freewheel offset trend,
I concluded simply that "Mavic just has sloppy centering."
With the same air pressure, tubeless tires produce more center shift than tubed ones.
Especially in cases you'd rarely see with tubeless,
when you go above 80 psi, it becomes pronounced.
Also, tire manufacturers vary—even the same claimed 25C has different actual widths
(to be precise, it's the internal volume that matters, not the external width),
and this changes the amount of shift.
Plus, higher rim depths shift less.
For these individual cases, constantly achieving perfect center during use
is neither practical nor possible,
and especially since this shop clearly doesn't have the skill to manage it,
watching them spout off about this is honestly hilarious. Though I feel bad for the customer.
On a separate note, recently an MTB wheel with terrible radial runout came in,
and it turned out the person who brought it could (supposedly) build wheels themselves.
I told them, "You built this? If you're bringing it in this condition,
we'd save time if we just built it from scratch materials here instead."
Turns out it was built by the Chris King waster.
The wheel is disc brake, but if it had been a rim brake wheel,
the radial runout was bad enough to make shoe positioning impossible,
and the center offset was terrible too.
If the customer agreed with that shop's philosophy,
I'd respect that, but since they requested wheel-only centering,
that's what I did.
I showed the customer the result, so I didn't photograph the perfect centering.
As for the front wheel, unusually, it was built properly.
↑Initially showed about one sheet of paper worth of offset,
but at every other position, centering was perfect.
Just a faint lateral runout,
and that also seemed to not have been there when the wheel was first built.
I didn't go looking, but the first position I checked
happened to be where the runout was.
There's some radial runout, though not severe,
which I showed the customer.
There were also two things the customer didn't specify
and didn't know about until I pointed them out.
First point.
The rear wheel was built with 3.2mm grip flats, 12mm length nipples
(almost certainly DT),
but the front wheel was built with 3.4mm grip flats, 14mm length nipples.
In other words, the front and rear wheels require different nipple wrench sizes.
Second point.
Since the inner rim holes on this rim don't have hole offset (at least it appears that way visually),
there shouldn't be any performance issue, but
the front wheel's radial lacing was built with reverse hole offset.
Like the intentional center offset they claim,
these must also be done for some profound reason I simply can't understand.
Starting with the rear wheel.
The hub is from the BITEX brand and built to roughly semi-competition four-cross lacing.
When I call something "wasting a Chris King,"
it doesn't just mean building a crappy wheel with an expensive Chris King hub
and stealing money for such work—
I limit that term to the work of one specific shop.
This is a wheel built there.
Those guys would never come up with semi-competition four-cross lacing on their own,
so this is, charitably speaking, a generic Nomu Lab wheel knockoff,
or less charitably, a Nomu Lab wheel imitation.
The reason it ended up as semi-competition four-cross lacing equivalent
was the customer's request.
By "equivalent," I mean the freewheel-side comp on the rear came from the shop's stock,
and the aero spokes—same dimensions as the Shimano CX-RAY for the front left and right
and the rear non-freewheel side—aren't Sapim CX-RAY but rather mac spokes,
because those were the customer's own parts.
I mean, bringing a Nomu Lab wheel knockoff to our shop for inspection
takes some guts, but well, that's fine.
For the record, I'm not angry. I don't have feelings of like or dislike about this sort of thing,
but honestly, I find it pretty amusing.
If I wrote about things like the sticker on the rim visible in the photo
and the backstory of the customer-supplied spokes,
the customer wondered whether that shop—the one wasting Chris Kings—
would recognize itself when reading this.
Apparently, they don't mind if it does.
There's some center offset, but apparently that's intentional.
The reason is that under load, the rim shifts (which is actually true),
so they offset the center in anticipation of that.
Since the amount differs between tubeless and tubed setups (also true),
it was originally set up for tubeless mode
but is now being run in tubed mode,
so they went back and deliberately re-offset it to tubed mode.
As for me, on my own rear wheel, I offset the rim toward the non-freewheel side
by about the thickness of a sheet of paper for a different reason,
but I didn't do that for this customer's rear wheel.
Achieving perfect center under load
is impossible, as I've written before.
So when I build a wheel, I aim for perfect center on the wheel itself.
Campagnolo and Fulcrum clearly do the same.
Mavic rear wheels almost invariably
show the rim shifted toward the non-freewheel side,
and I've wondered if that was intentional,
but even rim brake front wheels, which don't need any center offset at all,
frequently show shifts.
While I can't explain the non-freewheel offset trend,
I concluded simply that "Mavic just has sloppy centering."
With the same air pressure, tubeless tires produce more center shift than tubed ones.
Especially in cases you'd rarely see with tubeless,
when you go above 80 psi, it becomes pronounced.
Also, tire manufacturers vary—even the same claimed 25C has different actual widths
(to be precise, it's the internal volume that matters, not the external width),
and this changes the amount of shift.
Plus, higher rim depths shift less.
For these individual cases, constantly achieving perfect center during use
is neither practical nor possible,
and especially since this shop clearly doesn't have the skill to manage it,
watching them spout off about this is honestly hilarious. Though I feel bad for the customer.
On a separate note, recently an MTB wheel with terrible radial runout came in,
and it turned out the person who brought it could (supposedly) build wheels themselves.
I told them, "You built this? If you're bringing it in this condition,
we'd save time if we just built it from scratch materials here instead."
Turns out it was built by the Chris King waster.
The wheel is disc brake, but if it had been a rim brake wheel,
the radial runout was bad enough to make shoe positioning impossible,
and the center offset was terrible too.
If the customer agreed with that shop's philosophy,
I'd respect that, but since they requested wheel-only centering,
that's what I did.
I showed the customer the result, so I didn't photograph the perfect centering.
As for the front wheel, unusually, it was built properly.
↑Initially showed about one sheet of paper worth of offset,
but at every other position, centering was perfect.
Just a faint lateral runout,
and that also seemed to not have been there when the wheel was first built.
I didn't go looking, but the first position I checked
happened to be where the runout was.
There's some radial runout, though not severe,
which I showed the customer.
There were also two things the customer didn't specify
and didn't know about until I pointed them out.
First point.
The rear wheel was built with 3.2mm grip flats, 12mm length nipples
(almost certainly DT),
but the front wheel was built with 3.4mm grip flats, 14mm length nipples.
In other words, the front and rear wheels require different nipple wrench sizes.
Second point.
Since the inner rim holes on this rim don't have hole offset (at least it appears that way visually),
there shouldn't be any performance issue, but
the front wheel's radial lacing was built with reverse hole offset.
Like the intentional center offset they claim,
these must also be done for some profound reason I simply can't understand.