・・・When I asked the customer about the history
it turned out to be a completely assembled wheel made in-house by the manufacturer (Gokiso).
I had suspected it might not be a manufacturer-assembled wheel
because there were several unbelievable issues,
but it was.
There was quite a significant center offset,
but actually this isn't much of a problem in itself.
Most likely, when the wheel was first built,
the rim was either perfectly centered,
or slightly offset to the right,
and over the years the rim has drifted further right.
It drifts over time even without actual use.
If you build a rear wheel on a hub with an occhio (offset),
you can confirm it's perfectly centered right after assembly,
but even if you leave it unused for 10 years sitting on a stand,
the rim will drift right by an amount measurable on a centering gauge.
This depends on spoke tension, but
higher tension causes faster drift.
Of course, drift from actual use is faster than drift from static aging.
This wheel has radial spoke lacing on the non-freewheel side,
and with radial lacing there's no loss of angle in the spoke trajectory when viewed from the side,
so the center drift over time tends to progress faster
than with tangent lacing on both sides in a rear wheel.
Up to this point, these are natural occurrences
and I'm not criticizing them.
Here's where it gets bad.
The rim left and right have been assembled backwards.
The rim needs to be assembled with the side that has
the silver serial number sticker near the valve hole,
and also the sticker (which has been removed from this rim)
with the warning to use genuine brake shoes,
facing the left side.
To be precise, this requirement applies only to rear rims.
In the case of the Nomulab Wheel No. 2 rims from the same manufacturer,
the hole count specifications are 18, 20, 24, and 28H,
where the first two are 18F and 20F front rims
and the latter two are 24R and 28R rear rims.
You'd rarely build a rear wheel on an 18F rim,
but it's possible to build a 20H rear wheel on a 20F rim.
However, the 24R and 28R rims have directional orientation
that takes the occhio into account,
whether or not there's radial offset in the rim holes on the inner circumference.
With Nomulab Wheel No. 2 rims,
I honestly can't tell visually,
but there's no reason to deliberately go against what the manufacturer says.
Addendum: This directional orientation was confirmed through testing in this article.
↑Apparently it's like this.
If it were just the rim assembled backwards,
it would have been manageable, but...
↑Freewheel side
↑Non-freewheel side
The wheel has been built treating it as a reverse rim.
But the holes on the outer circumference of this rim have
clear radial offset, and when checked,
it was actually a normal rim.
↑The rim hole in the center of the image—
the spoke from the freewheel side flange is threaded through it,
so if you offset the rim hole following the spoke trajectory extension,
the hole should be offset downward in the image,
but as you can see, they've built it with the normal rim offset hole
treated as a reverse rim, so
the hole is offset upward in the image.
↑It's like this
Close-up view.
Since it's not following the hole offset,
the 3.2mm wrench that grabs the square
rubs roughly against the rim hole edge.
↑The neighboring rim hole is like this
Unless you're an absolute idiot,
you should notice something's wrong after the initial assembly phase.
So either the Gokiso builder is an absolute idiot,
or they're the type who pushes through wheel building even after noticing the mistake,
either way it's a problem.
The quality of the work doesn't match the price they charged for the wheel.
By the way, the front rim had no radial offset on the outer circumference.
Also, the front wheel was originally built treating it as a normal rim.
Since the spokes are different in length and color,
I won't reuse them when rebuilding,
but cutting spokes while tension is applied
can damage the rim I'm returning to the customer,
so I gradually loosen all the nipples in sequence.
During this process, the rim's fore-aft direction and the hub's left-right direction
aren't perpendicular—they tilt as shown in the image above—
there was a hole where I couldn't get a tool on the nipple at all.
In the image above, you can see the freewheel body on the left side,
and that rim hole should be for spokes
from the non-freewheel side with radial offset.
The nipple is offset downward in the image
because of the approach angle from the tangent-laced non-porcupine direction.
Rather than an internal nipple,
they were using a universal nipple reversed.
I sometimes do this myself, but
universal nipples have a slot that internal nipples don't,
and the contact surface with the rim mills (like milling machine motion)
allowing carbon dust to accumulate in the slot.
Also, internal nipples have a small clearance dimension
at the inner end before the threads start,
so the range of appropriate spoke length changes slightly.
The problem here is that they were using
the 14mm length nipples that come as extras with CX-RAY.
Depending on rim height and how much the outer hole is offset,
the longer the reversed nipple,
the harder it is to grip securely with a tool.
The diagram above shows a tubular rim,
but for the 25mm high rim AXLightness I recently built,
the manufacturer's complete assembly specifies 12mm length
DT Pro Lock nipples,
but 12mm was too short to fully complete the wheel build
(I got it to a pretty good state after the initial assembly phase),
so I changed to ENVE's 10mm length internal nipples
and built the wheel.
That 2mm difference is very significant.
So, not only did they get the hole offset wrong and force through the wheel build,
but they're also using long nipples reversed,
so after the initial assembly phase the tool
was only engaging shallowly,
and there are clear marks of shallow tool engagement.
You can't tell with the wheel assembled,
but looking closely at just the rim,
there's radial offset in the inner hole too.
Looking at it from the valve hole, going around as left, right, left, right,
but looking even more carefully, the pattern is actually center, left, center, left.
If the rightward and leftward offsets were the same magnitude,
the rim wouldn't have left-right distinction,
but the freewheel side hole isn't offset horizontally at the rim center,
so this rim does have left-right distinction.
↑A slightly blurry close-up, but
the left image is the freewheel side spoke hole at the rim center,
the right is offset to one side so it's the non-freewheel side spoke hole.
This is really important, but
for the freewheel side spoke rim hole,
I threaded a #14 plain black straight spoke through
the hole at the rim center
and engaged the threads on the nipple.
Holding the rim horizontal,
I measured how much it tilts from just the spoke's own weight.
In the image, you can see the silver sticker on the far side indicating the left side.
That means in the image above,
the rim is drooping on the face that would be
the left side of the wheel.
The spoke is threaded through the freewheel side spoke hole,
so the direction the spoke droops is opposite from the intended trajectory.
From here, using the image's both ends as the rotation axis,
I flip the rim over.
The amount the spoke droops is dramatically different.
This is natural if the rim hole has radial offset,
but the important point is that it's happening at a hole that appears to be at the center.
In other words, in addition to the rim hole radial offset,
there's also directional orientation built in.
The original wheel in this case
not only has the rim left and right backwards
but also commits the double mistake of treating a normal rim as a reverse rim.
So even if we don't change the rim to something else,taking the easy way out
rebuilding is essential.
Getting the rim left-right wrong is one thing (←but it's not okay),
but there's a Gokiso-specific reason for the mistake of treating a normal rim as a reverse rim.
To review what I mean by
normal rim and reverse rim,
when looking at an equal-sided spoke wheel from the side,
there's the hub flange closer to you
and the hub flange farther away,
When rim holes have radial offset,
the vast majority of rims on the market are set up so that
the spoke going clockwise from the valve hole to the next rim hole
comes from the far hub flange,
and those rims are called normal offset rims (normal rims),
while others are called reverse offset rims (reverse rims).
The diagram above is a normal rim.
This relationship doesn't change even if you flip the rim over.
Examples of reverse rims include
the front rim of Racing Zero for rim brakes,
some Colima rims,
what appears to be manufacturing error in Ambrosio
Formula Chrono 20 rim 28H from a certain period (32H is normal rim),
and mysteriously, the IT wheel rim made by Duke
(other Duke rims are normal rim), etc.
↑For that one, the builder was an idiot so
it was built treating it as a normal rim.
Also, Reynolds has carbon rims without hole offset
where the front wheel is built treating it as a reverse rim.
I built it with left-right tangent lacing.
When looking at this rear wheel from the right side,
let's say the spoke drawn in red is the freewheel side
and the spoke drawn in blue is the non-freewheel side.
If from this state the rim hole offset is wrong
and only the rim shifts by one rim hole
while keeping the hub and spoke shapes,
in either case, the valve hole appears in the crotch of the final cross
of the tangent lacing, making it an awkward-looking wheel.
But with single-sided radial lacing
(in the diagram above, non-freewheel side radial),
only in case B does the valve hole position
not look unnatural to the eye.
So at first glance it doesn't look like
there's a hole offset error (reverse rim treatment).
In the diagram, when looking at the wheel from the right side,
from the valve hole going counter-clockwise, the neighboring spoke is
the non-freewheel side spoke from the far flange,
and going clockwise, the neighboring spoke is
the freewheel side spoke from the near flange,
but
↑in the actual wheel too, when looking from the right side, from the valve hole
going counter-clockwise, the neighboring spoke is
the non-freewheel side spoke from the far flange,
and going clockwise, the neighboring spoke is
the freewheel side spoke from the near flange,
which checks out.
Non-freewheel side radial lacing makes hole offset errors
harder to spot, so
this is talked about as a Gokiso-specific mistake—
using non-freewheel side radial lacing,
but having clear radial offset on the outer hole,
and the tool not reaching the nipple core while
the tool's driver portion roughly rubs the rim hole edge,
yet not noticing the hole offset error—or noticing but forcing through anyway—
either way is unacceptable.
Addendum: Something I forgot to write about in the wheel article
Gokiso's complete assembly wheels have
very high spoke tension.
On a wheel that has spoke tension levels where
the wheel functions as a wheel,
if you loosen all left and right nipples by the same amount, like one full turn,
lower tension wheels lose more tension.
In other words, a wheel that's already well-tensioned
won't gain much hardness even if you over-tighten the nipples further.
On a 24H rear wheel built entirely with CX-RAY,
with "44 lacing" (4-cross freewheel, 4-cross non-freewheel) and "40 lacing"
(4-cross freewheel, 0-cross non-freewheel),
starting from a state where "both have the same freewheel side tension
and the wheel is centered,"
if you loosen all nipples by the same amount on both wheels,
the non-freewheel side spokes of the 40 lacing,
which has larger left-right tension difference,
get so loose you can wiggle them with your finger—they're completely floppy—
making tension meter measurement impossible
(the needle won't move from zero).
If we say this is the result of loosening all nipples by, say, 4 turns from the complete state,
then the 44 laced rear wheel, also with all nipples loosened 4 turns,
won't reach the point of being so sloppy it's unsafe to use.
What I'm getting at is,
an equal-sided spoke wheel with non-freewheel side radial lacing
can't get the non-freewheel side spokes out of their mushy state
unless you tension them really tight.
On the other hand, the Gokiso hub
is materially very hard,
and the old spoke holes showed no bite marks from the spoke nipple.
There's only barely a trace of where the spoke rubbed on the hub flange side.
Originally it was like this, but
when trying to align the hub body phase visible from the valve hole
with the manufacturer's logo,
the hole for the initial spoke on the freewheel side
matched between before and after rebuild.
In the image above, the right side is the old spoke hole from earlier.
By the way, since this is 46 Italian lacing,
the initial move is "right drop" as shown in the image.
↑When looking through the valve hole of the rebuilt rim, it's like this
↑Front rim, 20F, no outer hole offset
↑Rear rim, 24R, outer hole offset present
The rim was ridiculously heavy.
The rear rim, while not an offset rim,
had a weight difference that made it seem like it was.
The weight difference was so extreme that
I wondered if the scale wasn't zeroing out correctly,
so I even lifted the rim to double-check.
This rim is a Gokiso custom rim, but
to highlight the rotation performance of their own hub,
for the sake of showmanship and manufacturer ego-stroking,
they've made the rim far heavier than what would be considered normal.
For complete assembly wheels
it turned out to be a completely assembled wheel made in-house by the manufacturer (Gokiso).
I had suspected it might not be a manufacturer-assembled wheel
because there were several unbelievable issues,
but it was.
There was quite a significant center offset,
but actually this isn't much of a problem in itself.
Most likely, when the wheel was first built,
the rim was either perfectly centered,
or slightly offset to the right,
and over the years the rim has drifted further right.
It drifts over time even without actual use.
If you build a rear wheel on a hub with an occhio (offset),
you can confirm it's perfectly centered right after assembly,
but even if you leave it unused for 10 years sitting on a stand,
the rim will drift right by an amount measurable on a centering gauge.
This depends on spoke tension, but
higher tension causes faster drift.
Of course, drift from actual use is faster than drift from static aging.
This wheel has radial spoke lacing on the non-freewheel side,
and with radial lacing there's no loss of angle in the spoke trajectory when viewed from the side,
so the center drift over time tends to progress faster
than with tangent lacing on both sides in a rear wheel.
Up to this point, these are natural occurrences
and I'm not criticizing them.
Here's where it gets bad.
The rim left and right have been assembled backwards.
The rim needs to be assembled with the side that has
the silver serial number sticker near the valve hole,
and also the sticker (which has been removed from this rim)
with the warning to use genuine brake shoes,
facing the left side.
To be precise, this requirement applies only to rear rims.
In the case of the Nomulab Wheel No. 2 rims from the same manufacturer,
the hole count specifications are 18, 20, 24, and 28H,
where the first two are 18F and 20F front rims
and the latter two are 24R and 28R rear rims.
You'd rarely build a rear wheel on an 18F rim,
but it's possible to build a 20H rear wheel on a 20F rim.
However, the 24R and 28R rims have directional orientation
that takes the occhio into account,
whether or not there's radial offset in the rim holes on the inner circumference.
With Nomulab Wheel No. 2 rims,
I honestly can't tell visually,
but there's no reason to deliberately go against what the manufacturer says.
Addendum: This directional orientation was confirmed through testing in this article.
↑Apparently it's like this.
If it were just the rim assembled backwards,
it would have been manageable, but...
↑Freewheel side
↑Non-freewheel side
The wheel has been built treating it as a reverse rim.
But the holes on the outer circumference of this rim have
clear radial offset, and when checked,
it was actually a normal rim.
↑The rim hole in the center of the image—
the spoke from the freewheel side flange is threaded through it,
so if you offset the rim hole following the spoke trajectory extension,
the hole should be offset downward in the image,
but as you can see, they've built it with the normal rim offset hole
treated as a reverse rim, so
the hole is offset upward in the image.
↑It's like this
Close-up view.
Since it's not following the hole offset,
the 3.2mm wrench that grabs the square
rubs roughly against the rim hole edge.
↑The neighboring rim hole is like this
Unless you're an absolute idiot,
you should notice something's wrong after the initial assembly phase.
So either the Gokiso builder is an absolute idiot,
or they're the type who pushes through wheel building even after noticing the mistake,
either way it's a problem.
The quality of the work doesn't match the price they charged for the wheel.
By the way, the front rim had no radial offset on the outer circumference.
Also, the front wheel was originally built treating it as a normal rim.
Since the spokes are different in length and color,
I won't reuse them when rebuilding,
but cutting spokes while tension is applied
can damage the rim I'm returning to the customer,
so I gradually loosen all the nipples in sequence.
During this process, the rim's fore-aft direction and the hub's left-right direction
aren't perpendicular—they tilt as shown in the image above—
there was a hole where I couldn't get a tool on the nipple at all.
In the image above, you can see the freewheel body on the left side,
and that rim hole should be for spokes
from the non-freewheel side with radial offset.
The nipple is offset downward in the image
because of the approach angle from the tangent-laced non-porcupine direction.
Rather than an internal nipple,
they were using a universal nipple reversed.
I sometimes do this myself, but
universal nipples have a slot that internal nipples don't,
and the contact surface with the rim mills (like milling machine motion)
allowing carbon dust to accumulate in the slot.
Also, internal nipples have a small clearance dimension
at the inner end before the threads start,
so the range of appropriate spoke length changes slightly.
The problem here is that they were using
the 14mm length nipples that come as extras with CX-RAY.
Depending on rim height and how much the outer hole is offset,
the longer the reversed nipple,
the harder it is to grip securely with a tool.
The diagram above shows a tubular rim,
but for the 25mm high rim AXLightness I recently built,
the manufacturer's complete assembly specifies 12mm length
DT Pro Lock nipples,
but 12mm was too short to fully complete the wheel build
(I got it to a pretty good state after the initial assembly phase),
so I changed to ENVE's 10mm length internal nipples
and built the wheel.
That 2mm difference is very significant.
So, not only did they get the hole offset wrong and force through the wheel build,
but they're also using long nipples reversed,
so after the initial assembly phase the tool
was only engaging shallowly,
and there are clear marks of shallow tool engagement.
You can't tell with the wheel assembled,
but looking closely at just the rim,
there's radial offset in the inner hole too.
Looking at it from the valve hole, going around as left, right, left, right,
but looking even more carefully, the pattern is actually center, left, center, left.
If the rightward and leftward offsets were the same magnitude,
the rim wouldn't have left-right distinction,
but the freewheel side hole isn't offset horizontally at the rim center,
so this rim does have left-right distinction.
↑A slightly blurry close-up, but
the left image is the freewheel side spoke hole at the rim center,
the right is offset to one side so it's the non-freewheel side spoke hole.
This is really important, but
for the freewheel side spoke rim hole,
I threaded a #14 plain black straight spoke through
the hole at the rim center
and engaged the threads on the nipple.
Holding the rim horizontal,
I measured how much it tilts from just the spoke's own weight.
In the image, you can see the silver sticker on the far side indicating the left side.
That means in the image above,
the rim is drooping on the face that would be
the left side of the wheel.
The spoke is threaded through the freewheel side spoke hole,
so the direction the spoke droops is opposite from the intended trajectory.
From here, using the image's both ends as the rotation axis,
I flip the rim over.
The amount the spoke droops is dramatically different.
This is natural if the rim hole has radial offset,
but the important point is that it's happening at a hole that appears to be at the center.
In other words, in addition to the rim hole radial offset,
there's also directional orientation built in.
The original wheel in this case
not only has the rim left and right backwards
but also commits the double mistake of treating a normal rim as a reverse rim.
So even if we don't change the rim to something else,
rebuilding is essential.
Getting the rim left-right wrong is one thing (←but it's not okay),
but there's a Gokiso-specific reason for the mistake of treating a normal rim as a reverse rim.
To review what I mean by
normal rim and reverse rim,
when looking at an equal-sided spoke wheel from the side,
there's the hub flange closer to you
and the hub flange farther away,
When rim holes have radial offset,
the vast majority of rims on the market are set up so that
the spoke going clockwise from the valve hole to the next rim hole
comes from the far hub flange,
and those rims are called normal offset rims (normal rims),
while others are called reverse offset rims (reverse rims).
The diagram above is a normal rim.
This relationship doesn't change even if you flip the rim over.
Examples of reverse rims include
the front rim of Racing Zero for rim brakes,
some Colima rims,
what appears to be manufacturing error in Ambrosio
Formula Chrono 20 rim 28H from a certain period (32H is normal rim),
and mysteriously, the IT wheel rim made by Duke
(other Duke rims are normal rim), etc.
↑For that one, the builder was an idiot so
it was built treating it as a normal rim.
Also, Reynolds has carbon rims without hole offset
where the front wheel is built treating it as a reverse rim.
I built it with left-right tangent lacing.
When looking at this rear wheel from the right side,
let's say the spoke drawn in red is the freewheel side
and the spoke drawn in blue is the non-freewheel side.
If from this state the rim hole offset is wrong
and only the rim shifts by one rim hole
while keeping the hub and spoke shapes,
in either case, the valve hole appears in the crotch of the final cross
of the tangent lacing, making it an awkward-looking wheel.
But with single-sided radial lacing
(in the diagram above, non-freewheel side radial),
only in case B does the valve hole position
not look unnatural to the eye.
So at first glance it doesn't look like
there's a hole offset error (reverse rim treatment).
In the diagram, when looking at the wheel from the right side,
from the valve hole going counter-clockwise, the neighboring spoke is
the non-freewheel side spoke from the far flange,
and going clockwise, the neighboring spoke is
the freewheel side spoke from the near flange,
but
↑in the actual wheel too, when looking from the right side, from the valve hole
going counter-clockwise, the neighboring spoke is
the non-freewheel side spoke from the far flange,
and going clockwise, the neighboring spoke is
the freewheel side spoke from the near flange,
which checks out.
Non-freewheel side radial lacing makes hole offset errors
harder to spot, so
this is talked about as a Gokiso-specific mistake—
using non-freewheel side radial lacing,
but having clear radial offset on the outer hole,
and the tool not reaching the nipple core while
the tool's driver portion roughly rubs the rim hole edge,
yet not noticing the hole offset error—or noticing but forcing through anyway—
either way is unacceptable.
Addendum: Something I forgot to write about in the wheel article
Gokiso's complete assembly wheels have
very high spoke tension.
On a wheel that has spoke tension levels where
the wheel functions as a wheel,
if you loosen all left and right nipples by the same amount, like one full turn,
lower tension wheels lose more tension.
In other words, a wheel that's already well-tensioned
won't gain much hardness even if you over-tighten the nipples further.
On a 24H rear wheel built entirely with CX-RAY,
with "44 lacing" (4-cross freewheel, 4-cross non-freewheel) and "40 lacing"
(4-cross freewheel, 0-cross non-freewheel),
starting from a state where "both have the same freewheel side tension
and the wheel is centered,"
if you loosen all nipples by the same amount on both wheels,
the non-freewheel side spokes of the 40 lacing,
which has larger left-right tension difference,
get so loose you can wiggle them with your finger—they're completely floppy—
making tension meter measurement impossible
(the needle won't move from zero).
If we say this is the result of loosening all nipples by, say, 4 turns from the complete state,
then the 44 laced rear wheel, also with all nipples loosened 4 turns,
won't reach the point of being so sloppy it's unsafe to use.
What I'm getting at is,
an equal-sided spoke wheel with non-freewheel side radial lacing
can't get the non-freewheel side spokes out of their mushy state
unless you tension them really tight.
On the other hand, the Gokiso hub
is materially very hard,
and the old spoke holes showed no bite marks from the spoke nipple.
There's only barely a trace of where the spoke rubbed on the hub flange side.
Originally it was like this, but
when trying to align the hub body phase visible from the valve hole
with the manufacturer's logo,
the hole for the initial spoke on the freewheel side
matched between before and after rebuild.
In the image above, the right side is the old spoke hole from earlier.
By the way, since this is 46 Italian lacing,
the initial move is "right drop" as shown in the image.
↑When looking through the valve hole of the rebuilt rim, it's like this
↑Front rim, 20F, no outer hole offset
↑Rear rim, 24R, outer hole offset present
The rim was ridiculously heavy.
The rear rim, while not an offset rim,
had a weight difference that made it seem like it was.
The weight difference was so extreme that
I wondered if the scale wasn't zeroing out correctly,
so I even lifted the rim to double-check.
This rim is a Gokiso custom rim, but
to highlight the rotation performance of their own hub,
for the sake of showmanship and manufacturer ego-stroking,
they've made the rim far heavier than what would be considered normal.
For complete assembly wheels
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