Today it's wheels again (etc.).
A customer brought in a rear wheel from a Roval CL50.
They want me to rebuild it so it rolls a bit smoother.
The CL50's rim is the same as the CLX50,
but the spokes aren't all-black Aero Lite—
they're all-black Compete Race instead,
and the nipples are brass.
For this rebuild, I'm swapping them out for DT universal aluminum nipples,
which means I need to completely disassemble the wheel.
With a CLX, you'd only need to change the spoke tension ratio on the non-drive side,
so you wouldn't necessarily need a full teardown,
but rather than trust the original truing accuracy,
it's cleaner to take it completely apart.
Plus, the full disassembly and reassembly process includes
steps to reduce nipple friction, so
I end up doing a complete teardown most of the time anyway.
It's built.
It's a reverse asymmetric build—a black half-CX sprint.
I'll braze the spokes later, but in this no-braze, perfectly centered state,
the amount of spoke deformation on the drive side is something you'd never see on a stock CLX.
If you tried to tension the drive side this much from a stock state,
the non-drive side would hit a tension dead-end.
Actually, a stock setup is basically already at that dead-end.
Eventually I'll hand this over to the customer, but
I'd like to keep it on hand as a sample that shows
"how far you can push it with nothing but engineering logic, no braze job."
Even Roval could achieve pretty much the same thing with the CLX
just by using DT Aero Lite on the drive side and DT Aero Comp on the non-drive side,
but they got so caught up chasing aerodynamics and weight savings
that they've lost perspective on what actually matters in wheel design.
If that performance issue wasn't showing up in real-world use—
if riders couldn't tell the difference—then fine,
but that's not what we're seeing, which is why these wheels keep coming to the shop.
A customer brought in a rear wheel from a Roval CL50.
They want me to rebuild it so it rolls a bit smoother.
The CL50's rim is the same as the CLX50,
but the spokes aren't all-black Aero Lite—
they're all-black Compete Race instead,
and the nipples are brass.
For this rebuild, I'm swapping them out for DT universal aluminum nipples,
which means I need to completely disassemble the wheel.
With a CLX, you'd only need to change the spoke tension ratio on the non-drive side,
so you wouldn't necessarily need a full teardown,
but rather than trust the original truing accuracy,
it's cleaner to take it completely apart.
Plus, the full disassembly and reassembly process includes
steps to reduce nipple friction, so
I end up doing a complete teardown most of the time anyway.
It's built.
It's a reverse asymmetric build—a black half-CX sprint.
I'll braze the spokes later, but in this no-braze, perfectly centered state,
the amount of spoke deformation on the drive side is something you'd never see on a stock CLX.
If you tried to tension the drive side this much from a stock state,
the non-drive side would hit a tension dead-end.
Actually, a stock setup is basically already at that dead-end.
Eventually I'll hand this over to the customer, but
I'd like to keep it on hand as a sample that shows
"how far you can push it with nothing but engineering logic, no braze job."
Even Roval could achieve pretty much the same thing with the CLX
just by using DT Aero Lite on the drive side and DT Aero Comp on the non-drive side,
but they got so caught up chasing aerodynamics and weight savings
that they've lost perspective on what actually matters in wheel design.
If that performance issue wasn't showing up in real-world use—
if riders couldn't tell the difference—then fine,
but that's not what we're seeing, which is why these wheels keep coming to the shop.