Another wheel day (and so on).
A customer brought me the rear wheel of a Roval Rapide CLX50 to work on.
The rear wheel has runout, so they wanted it fixed,
which would normally take about 10 minutes of work,
but the customer said the "engagement isn't good" and "direct feel is weak,"
so they want me to do something about that.
The CL50 has a 50mm rim depth but is laced with round spokes,
whereas the CLX50 is laced with aero spokes,
all-black aero light straight 2:1 X1 lacing where
the freewheel side is 2-cross and the drive side is 1-cross.
On the drive side—or rather, the disc rotor side—I don't want to do radial lacing,
so I'm doing tangential lacing on the fewer-spoke side of the 2:1 lacing,
but this itself presents issues and makes it harder to optimize further.
↑At most phases there's virtually no runout,
↑but right around here there's a noticeable lateral wobble.
I examined the spokes in this phase area carefully
but didn't find any that were particularly bent.
Since I ended up doing a complete disassembly anyway,
I checked again during that process.
For the freewheel side spokes, after loosening them sufficiently,
I removed them from the flange hook and
flipped the spoke just before the final crossing.
The crossing is woven, and there were scuff marks.
I rebuilt it.
I replaced the drive side with black CX Sprint straight spokes
and tensioned it higher than the original state.
This work alone wouldn't require a complete wheel disassembly,
but it was necessary for the blog post value, so I disassembled it.
Since I did this for my own purposes,
I'm not charging the standard wheel-building labor.
And speaking of my own purposes, this work
satisfied the conditions for another wheel day.
↑The replaced spokes
With 1-cross lacing, the first crossing is the final crossing,
and these spokes also showed scuff marks.
The spoke heads are machined into a sliced-king-oyster-mushroom shape,
and indeed, the freewheel side spokes need that machining,
but actually, the drive side doesn't need it, so
I used the spoke heads as-is without machining.
I'm confident that this rebuild alone—with its reverse unequal-spoke-count lacing as a counter to the left-right unequal lacing—is already showing significant improvement,
and if I lace the freewheel side, it will improve even more.
But that's an irreversible modification, so I'll check with the customer once more.
If they happen to say "Take it back to the original!" I can
return the freewheel side to black CX-RAY and the drive side to the original spokes,
and that way I can restore it to pretty much the same state.
A customer brought me the rear wheel of a Roval Rapide CLX50 to work on.
The rear wheel has runout, so they wanted it fixed,
which would normally take about 10 minutes of work,
but the customer said the "engagement isn't good" and "direct feel is weak,"
so they want me to do something about that.
The CL50 has a 50mm rim depth but is laced with round spokes,
whereas the CLX50 is laced with aero spokes,
all-black aero light straight 2:1 X1 lacing where
the freewheel side is 2-cross and the drive side is 1-cross.
On the drive side—or rather, the disc rotor side—I don't want to do radial lacing,
so I'm doing tangential lacing on the fewer-spoke side of the 2:1 lacing,
but this itself presents issues and makes it harder to optimize further.
↑At most phases there's virtually no runout,
↑but right around here there's a noticeable lateral wobble.
I examined the spokes in this phase area carefully
but didn't find any that were particularly bent.
Since I ended up doing a complete disassembly anyway,
I checked again during that process.
For the freewheel side spokes, after loosening them sufficiently,
I removed them from the flange hook and
flipped the spoke just before the final crossing.
The crossing is woven, and there were scuff marks.
I rebuilt it.
I replaced the drive side with black CX Sprint straight spokes
and tensioned it higher than the original state.
This work alone wouldn't require a complete wheel disassembly,
but it was necessary for the blog post value, so I disassembled it.
Since I did this for my own purposes,
I'm not charging the standard wheel-building labor.
And speaking of my own purposes, this work
satisfied the conditions for another wheel day.
↑The replaced spokes
With 1-cross lacing, the first crossing is the final crossing,
and these spokes also showed scuff marks.
The spoke heads are machined into a sliced-king-oyster-mushroom shape,
and indeed, the freewheel side spokes need that machining,
but actually, the drive side doesn't need it, so
I used the spoke heads as-is without machining.
I'm confident that this rebuild alone—with its reverse unequal-spoke-count lacing as a counter to the left-right unequal lacing—is already showing significant improvement,
and if I lace the freewheel side, it will improve even more.
But that's an irreversible modification, so I'll check with the customer once more.
If they happen to say "Take it back to the original!" I can
return the freewheel side to black CX-RAY and the drive side to the original spokes,
and that way I can restore it to pretty much the same state.