Another wheel day (etc.).
A customer left me both wheels of a Roval Alpinist CLX.
Today I'm rebuilding just the front wheel,
but the feedback was: "Even though it's light, the power just seems to slip away—to be honest, it doesn't climb. With a Racing Zero Carbon DB or Bora WTO, that never happens."
So they asked if there's anything I can do to fix it.
From listening and reading their letters, the critical vocabulary about Roval wheels is far richer than what I'm writing here,
and quite abundant overall.
The Racing Zero series is outstanding with its aluminum spokes, but as for off-the-shelf Rovels,
they're theoretically behind the Bora line by a fair margin.
About the only test where they might actually win is wind tunnel aerodynamic evaluation.
It's built.
I went with half-CX spokes. I'll do the truing later.
The reason for silver spokes is that the black CX spokes in the length needed for rebuilding the Alpinist are currently out of stock at both my shop and the distributors. Many customers are waiting for them to come in. For this wheel, the customer said "silver spokes are fine," so I used silver.
This silver spoke is still in stock at my shop, but the distributors are out.
The black aerolite on the many-spoke side was switched to silver CX-RAY just to match the color of the silver CX spokes on the few-spoke side.
Interestingly, before the rebuild, when you squeezed the final crossing, there was a crackling sound. But now that it's no longer under the black paint coating, it doesn't crackle anymore after the rebuild—even before truing.
According to the customer (who wrote their weight in the letter but I won't mention it here—it's not heavy anyway),
the creaking happened around a 10% grade, so the silver CX-RAY swap solved that too.
Though even if it were black, a proper truing would have fixed it anyway.
A customer left me both wheels of a Roval Alpinist CLX.
Today I'm rebuilding just the front wheel,
but the feedback was: "Even though it's light, the power just seems to slip away—to be honest, it doesn't climb. With a Racing Zero Carbon DB or Bora WTO, that never happens."
So they asked if there's anything I can do to fix it.
From listening and reading their letters, the critical vocabulary about Roval wheels is far richer than what I'm writing here,
and quite abundant overall.
The Racing Zero series is outstanding with its aluminum spokes, but as for off-the-shelf Rovels,
they're theoretically behind the Bora line by a fair margin.
About the only test where they might actually win is wind tunnel aerodynamic evaluation.
It's built.
I went with half-CX spokes. I'll do the truing later.
The reason for silver spokes is that the black CX spokes in the length needed for rebuilding the Alpinist are currently out of stock at both my shop and the distributors. Many customers are waiting for them to come in. For this wheel, the customer said "silver spokes are fine," so I used silver.
This silver spoke is still in stock at my shop, but the distributors are out.
The black aerolite on the many-spoke side was switched to silver CX-RAY just to match the color of the silver CX spokes on the few-spoke side.
Interestingly, before the rebuild, when you squeezed the final crossing, there was a crackling sound. But now that it's no longer under the black paint coating, it doesn't crackle anymore after the rebuild—even before truing.
According to the customer (who wrote their weight in the letter but I won't mention it here—it's not heavy anyway),
the creaking happened around a 10% grade, so the silver CX-RAY swap solved that too.
Though even if it were black, a proper truing would have fixed it anyway.