A customer brought in the rear wheel of a Nomu Lab Wheel #5 (custom wheelset).
The rim got bent like a potato chip after an accident.
The quick release shaft is bent pretty badly.
Before loosening anything, I can already see the rim is wavy.
It's got silver half-Campagnolo spokes with red nipples, and some spokes on the freewheel side were bent, so I'll replace those. Per our unwritten warranty policy, I won't charge the customer for spoke or nipple replacements. The only costs are half the normal wheel building labor and the rim itself. Since it happened recently, I surprisingly reused the aluminum nipples, but replaced about 7-8 of them based on visual inspection.
The bent spoke happened to be at the phase where the rim deformation was worst, and this is where cracks appeared in the rim holes. Even though this nipple looked fine visually, I replaced it anyway.
Mid-rim relocation...
The marked spoke with tape is the bent one, and I've relocated it to the new rim as part of the transfer process. For spoke replacement, it's faster to remove the freewheel body with sprocket than to loosen the lockring on the sprocket, so I do the wheel build with the sprocket still attached.
All built up.
When I align the old rim perfectly at a certain phase...
↑The difference is about this much.
When you put a straight new rim against the old potato chip rim, sometimes the straight rim "appears warped compared to the bent one." It's like that—sometimes a person's values and measuring stick get so twisted that when they compare themselves to what's generally considered normal, they interpret the difference as the straight thing being bent and themselves being right. When you think everyone else in the world is insane... it's actually just you who's the only one insane...
Wait, who's knocking at this hour?
The rim got bent like a potato chip after an accident.
The quick release shaft is bent pretty badly.
Before loosening anything, I can already see the rim is wavy.
It's got silver half-Campagnolo spokes with red nipples, and some spokes on the freewheel side were bent, so I'll replace those. Per our unwritten warranty policy, I won't charge the customer for spoke or nipple replacements. The only costs are half the normal wheel building labor and the rim itself. Since it happened recently, I surprisingly reused the aluminum nipples, but replaced about 7-8 of them based on visual inspection.
The bent spoke happened to be at the phase where the rim deformation was worst, and this is where cracks appeared in the rim holes. Even though this nipple looked fine visually, I replaced it anyway.
Mid-rim relocation...
The marked spoke with tape is the bent one, and I've relocated it to the new rim as part of the transfer process. For spoke replacement, it's faster to remove the freewheel body with sprocket than to loosen the lockring on the sprocket, so I do the wheel build with the sprocket still attached.
All built up.
When I align the old rim perfectly at a certain phase...
↑The difference is about this much.
When you put a straight new rim against the old potato chip rim, sometimes the straight rim "appears warped compared to the bent one." It's like that—sometimes a person's values and measuring stick get so twisted that when they compare themselves to what's generally considered normal, they interpret the difference as the straight thing being bent and themselves being right. When you think everyone else in the world is insane... it's actually just you who's the only one insane...
Wait, who's knocking at this hour?