・・・I asked the customer about the history of the wheel
and it turned out to be a factory-assembled complete wheel from the manufacturer (Gokiso) itself.
I'd been thinking it might not be a manufacturer's complete wheel
because there were so many unbelievable things done wrong with it.
There was quite a significant center offset,
but actually this isn't that much of a problem in itself.
The wheel was probably centered perfectly when first assembled,
or the rim had only a slight offset to the right,
and over time the rim has shifted further right.
This shift happens even without active use—just with age.
If you build a rear wheel on a hub with an OCO offset
and confirm the center is perfect at the time of assembly,
then leave it unused on a stand for 10 years,
the rim should still drift right enough to be measurable with a center gauge.
This depends on spoke tension, but
higher tension causes faster drift.
Of course, aging under use is faster than aging at rest.
This wheel is laced radial on the freewheel side,
and radial lacing means there's no angle loss in the spoke trajectory when viewing the wheel from the side,
so the center drift over time tends to progress faster
than with left-right tangent-laced rear wheels.
Everything up to this point is natural and I'm not criticizing it.
Now it gets bad.
The rim's left and right sides were assembled backwards.
The side with the silver serial number sticker
near the valve hole—and there was also a warning sticker
(now removed from this rim) saying to use genuine brake shoes—
needs to face the left side when building.
To be precise, this rule only applies to rear rims.
With the nomunlab wheel #2 rims from the same manufacturer,
the hole count specs 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 almost never 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 directionality built in—
whether or not there's hole offset on the inner side of the rim—
that accounts for the OCO offset.
On the nomunlab wheel #2 rims, it's honestly not visible to the eye,
but there's no reason to deliberately go against what the manufacturer says.
Addendum: Verification in this article confirmed the directionality exists.
↑Apparently it's set up this way.
If they'd only gotten the rim's left-right orientation wrong,
that would've been bad enough, but...
↑Freewheel side
↑Non-freewheel side
They assembled the wheel treating it like a reverse-orientation rim.
But when I looked at the rim's outer-side holes,
there was clear hole offset,
and checking the orientation showed it was actually a normal-orientation rim.
↑The rim hole in the center of the image—
the spokes from the freewheel-side flange pass through it,
so if you offset the rim holes according to the spoke trajectory extension,
the holes should be offset toward the bottom of the image,
but as you can see, they've assembled a normal-offset rim
as if it were reverse-offset,
so the holes are offset toward the top of the image instead.
↑Like this
Close-up for emphasis.
Since it doesn't follow the hole offset,
the 3.2mm wrench that grips the square fitting
scrapes hard against the rim hole rim.
↑The neighboring rim hole looks like this
You'd have to be pretty damn stupid not to notice something wrong
during and after the trial assembly.
So either Gokiso's builder is pretty damn stupid,
or they noticed the mistake but forced the wheel assembly anyway—
either way, it's a problem.
The quality of work doesn't match the price they charge for the wheel.
The front rim had no hole offset on its outer side, by the way.
Also, the original front wheel had been assembled
treating it as a normal-orientation rim.
For the rebuild, the spokes have different lengths and colors,
so I won't reuse them, but
if I cut spokes while they're under tension,
the damage would reach the rim I'm returning to the customer,
so I gradually loosen all the nipples in sequence.
During this process, the rim's front-back direction and hub's left-right direction
aren't perpendicular—they tilt as shown in the image above—
and I found there were holes where the wrench couldn't engage the nipple at all.
In the image above, you can see the freewheel body on the left side,
and the rim hole should be designed for spokes coming from the non-freewheel side.
The nipple is offset toward the bottom of the image
because of the incoming angle from tangent lacing on the non-outpoke side.
They were using a universal nipple reversed
instead of an internal nipple.
I do this myself sometimes, but
universal nipples have a slot that internal nipples don't have,
and this can mill the rim's contact surface,
leaving carbon debris in the slot.
Also, internal nipples have a slight clearance dimension at the inner end
before the threads start, so
the appropriate spoke length range shifts slightly.
The problem here is that they used
14mm-length nipples from the CX-RAY accessory kit.
Depending on rim height and outer hole offset,
the longer the reversed nipple is,
the harder it is to grip firmly with the tool.
The diagram above shows a tubular rim, but
the recently-built 25mm-height Alchemy Lightweight wheel
uses 12mm DT Pro Lock nipples according to the manufacturer's assembly specs,
but even 12mm was tight to fully assemble
(we got it to decent tension after trial assembly),
so I switched to ENVE internal 10mm-length nipples
for the rebuild.
That 2mm difference is huge.
So, with reversed hole offset and forced assembly using long nipples,
there were traces that after trial assembly
the tool was only engaging shallowly with the nipple.
You can't tell with the wheel assembled,
but looking carefully at just the rim,
there's hole offset on the inner side too.
Looking from left to right in the image, it appears to offset
right, left, right, left, but
looking more carefully, it offsets center, left, center, left.
If the right and left offset amplitudes were equal,
the rim would have no left-right distinction, but
the freewheel-side hole doesn't offset horizontally at rim center,
so this rim does have left-right distinction.
↑This is a slightly blurry close-up, but
the left of the image shows the rim-center hole for freewheel-side spokes,
and the right shows an offset hole, so it's for non-freewheel-side spokes.
This is super important, but
I passed a #14 plain black straight spoke
through the rim-center freewheel-side spoke hole
and threaded it onto the nipple.
I leveled the rim horizontally
and measured how much it sags under its own weight.
You can see the silver sticker indicating the left side in the background of the image.
In other words, the state in the image above
means the side of the rim pointing down
is the side that would be the wheel's left side.
Since I'm running the spoke through the freewheel-side hole,
the direction the spoke sags is opposite to the intended trajectory.
From here, I flip the rim using the image's edges as a rotation axis.
The amount of spoke sag is dramatically different.
This would be routine if the rim holes had offset,
but the key point is that it's happening at what appears to be a center hole.
In other words, there's directionality built in
beyond just the hole offset on the rim holes themselves.
The original wheel committed not one but two errors:
getting the rim's left-right orientation wrong, AND
assembling a normal-orientation rim as if it were reverse-orientation.
So even if I hadn't changed the rim,
a rebuild was absolutely necessary.
The left-right rim mix-up is one thing (though it shouldn't be),
but there's a Gokiso-specific reason for the error
of treating a normal rim as reverse-oriented.
Let me recap what I mean by
normal-orientation vs. reverse-orientation rim:
When viewing an equal-sided-spoke-count wheel from the side,
there's a hub flange toward you (near side)
and one away from you (far side).
When rim holes have offset,
the vast majority of rims in the market
are designed so that the spoke coming from the far hub flange
goes into the hole that's clockwise from the valve hole
(when tracing holes clockwise from the valve)—
these are "normal-offset rims" (normal rims),
and those that don't follow this pattern are "reverse-offset rims" (reverse rims).
The diagram above is a normal rim.
This relationship holds even if you flip the rim.
Examples of reverse rims include
the front rim of Racing Zeros for rim brakes,
some Colima rims,
and what appears to be a manufacturing error in Formula Chrono 20 rims
from some periods of Ambrosio
(the 32H is normal while some 28H versions are reverse),
and Duke-brand IT wheel rims
(other Duke rims are normal) for unknown reasons.
↑Those were assembled as normal rims
by someone who didn't know better.
Also, Reynolds has carbon rims without hole offset
that are assembled as reverse rims on the front wheel only in some cases.
I built it as a left-right tangent-laced wheel.
Looking at the rear wheel from the right,
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 holes are offset incorrectly
while keeping the hub and spoke shapes unchanged,
and only the rim shifts by one hole space,
in both cases, the valve hole ends up
in the crotch of the final tangent crossing,
creating an ugly-looking wheel.
With single-side radial lacing
(non-freewheel side radial in this diagram),
only position B avoids the valve hole looking awkward
at its final crossing position.
So at first glance, it doesn't look like
the hole offset is wrong (reverse rim treatment).
In the diagram, viewing the wheel from the right with the valve hole at position B,
the adjacent spoke counterclockwise is a non-freewheel-side spoke from the far flange,
and the adjacent spoke clockwise is a freewheel-side spoke from the near flange,
↑and on the actual wheel viewed from the right with the valve hole,
the adjacent spoke counterclockwise is a non-freewheel-side spoke from the far flange,
and the adjacent spoke clockwise is a freewheel-side spoke from the near flange,
so it matched.
Non-freewheel-side radial lacing makes hole offset errors
harder to detect, so
this is a Gokiso-specific type of mistake—
but scraping the rim hole rim hard with the tool wrench
while the tool isn't fully seating on the nipple
and not noticing or choosing to force through the assembly anyway
is unacceptable either way.
Addendum: Something I forgot to write in the wheel article
Gokiso's factory-assembled complete wheels
have extremely high spoke tension.
With a wheel where spoke tension is adequate for the wheel to function,
if you loosen all nipples on both sides equally—say, one full turn each—
the lower the tension, the larger the tension drop per turn.
Conversely, once a wheel is already at high tension,
over-tightening nipples from there barely changes the feel.
With 24H wheels both fully built with CX-RAY
in 4-0 (44 spoke) and 4-4 (equal) rear wheel configurations,
starting from a state where "both have equal freewheel-side tension
and are centered,"
as you loosen all nipples equally on both wheels,
the 4-0 wheel with larger freewheel-side tension difference
will have the non-freewheel-side spokes become so loose
you can wiggle them side-to-side like a squishy toy
before a tension meter reading is even possible
(meter doesn't move from zero).
Say both wheels have all nipples loosened 4 full turns from final assembly—
the 4-4 wheel treated the same way
will still be squishy but not in the "you'll die if you ride it" category.
What I'm saying is:
with equal-sided-spoke rear wheels using non-freewheel-side radial lacing,
you have to crank the tension to absolutely maximum
to get the non-freewheel-side spokes past the squishy stage.
In contrast, Gokiso's hubs
are extremely hard materially—
the inpoke holes showed no bite marks from spoke seats.
There were only faint scratches on the hub flange sides
where spokes rubbed.
It was already like this, but
if I tried to align the hub shell phase with the logo
as visible through the valve hole,
the starting hole for the outpoke spoke on the freewheel side
matched between before and after rebuild.
The image on the right shows the former inpoke hole from the earlier image.
By the way, with 4-6 Italian lacing,
the first spoke is a "right drop" as shown.
↑After rebuild, looking through the valve hole in the rim, it looks like this
↑Front rim 20F no outer hole offset
↑Rear rim 24R with outer hole offset
The rim was absurdly heavy.
The rear rim had a weight difference as if it were an offset rim,
even though it's not an offset rim.
The weight difference was so extreme
I thought the scale wasn't zeroing when I weighed the rear rim,
so I lifted it to double-check.
This is a Gokiso custom rim, and
I can only think that to make their hub's rotation quality stand out
and to stage a more impressive magic trick—
for the manufacturer's own self-satisfaction—
they've made the rim heavy way beyond the range of normal products.
For wheels that are NOT Gokiso's factory-assembled complete wheels
but just built with their hubs,
I wouldn't be making this claim.
But for Gokiso's factory-assembled complete wheels specifically,
the absurd rim weight also contributes
to extending the spin time when doing the magic trick of
"put it on a stand and give it a flick,
and watch it keep spinning."
The speed boost on descents and the free-rolling feel on flats
when you stop pedaling are certainly good,
but I question whether people using this complete wheel
are aware of and accepting the rim's abnormal weight.
and it turned out to be a factory-assembled complete wheel from the manufacturer (Gokiso) itself.
I'd been thinking it might not be a manufacturer's complete wheel
because there were so many unbelievable things done wrong with it.
There was quite a significant center offset,
but actually this isn't that much of a problem in itself.
The wheel was probably centered perfectly when first assembled,
or the rim had only a slight offset to the right,
and over time the rim has shifted further right.
This shift happens even without active use—just with age.
If you build a rear wheel on a hub with an OCO offset
and confirm the center is perfect at the time of assembly,
then leave it unused on a stand for 10 years,
the rim should still drift right enough to be measurable with a center gauge.
This depends on spoke tension, but
higher tension causes faster drift.
Of course, aging under use is faster than aging at rest.
This wheel is laced radial on the freewheel side,
and radial lacing means there's no angle loss in the spoke trajectory when viewing the wheel from the side,
so the center drift over time tends to progress faster
than with left-right tangent-laced rear wheels.
Everything up to this point is natural and I'm not criticizing it.
Now it gets bad.
The rim's left and right sides were assembled backwards.
The side with the silver serial number sticker
near the valve hole—and there was also a warning sticker
(now removed from this rim) saying to use genuine brake shoes—
needs to face the left side when building.
To be precise, this rule only applies to rear rims.
With the nomunlab wheel #2 rims from the same manufacturer,
the hole count specs 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 almost never 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 directionality built in—
whether or not there's hole offset on the inner side of the rim—
that accounts for the OCO offset.
On the nomunlab wheel #2 rims, it's honestly not visible to the eye,
but there's no reason to deliberately go against what the manufacturer says.
Addendum: Verification in this article confirmed the directionality exists.
↑Apparently it's set up this way.
If they'd only gotten the rim's left-right orientation wrong,
that would've been bad enough, but...
↑Freewheel side
↑Non-freewheel side
They assembled the wheel treating it like a reverse-orientation rim.
But when I looked at the rim's outer-side holes,
there was clear hole offset,
and checking the orientation showed it was actually a normal-orientation rim.
↑The rim hole in the center of the image—
the spokes from the freewheel-side flange pass through it,
so if you offset the rim holes according to the spoke trajectory extension,
the holes should be offset toward the bottom of the image,
but as you can see, they've assembled a normal-offset rim
as if it were reverse-offset,
so the holes are offset toward the top of the image instead.
↑Like this
Close-up for emphasis.
Since it doesn't follow the hole offset,
the 3.2mm wrench that grips the square fitting
scrapes hard against the rim hole rim.
↑The neighboring rim hole looks like this
You'd have to be pretty damn stupid not to notice something wrong
during and after the trial assembly.
So either Gokiso's builder is pretty damn stupid,
or they noticed the mistake but forced the wheel assembly anyway—
either way, it's a problem.
The quality of work doesn't match the price they charge for the wheel.
The front rim had no hole offset on its outer side, by the way.
Also, the original front wheel had been assembled
treating it as a normal-orientation rim.
For the rebuild, the spokes have different lengths and colors,
so I won't reuse them, but
if I cut spokes while they're under tension,
the damage would reach the rim I'm returning to the customer,
so I gradually loosen all the nipples in sequence.
During this process, the rim's front-back direction and hub's left-right direction
aren't perpendicular—they tilt as shown in the image above—
and I found there were holes where the wrench couldn't engage the nipple at all.
In the image above, you can see the freewheel body on the left side,
and the rim hole should be designed for spokes coming from the non-freewheel side.
The nipple is offset toward the bottom of the image
because of the incoming angle from tangent lacing on the non-outpoke side.
They were using a universal nipple reversed
instead of an internal nipple.
I do this myself sometimes, but
universal nipples have a slot that internal nipples don't have,
and this can mill the rim's contact surface,
leaving carbon debris in the slot.
Also, internal nipples have a slight clearance dimension at the inner end
before the threads start, so
the appropriate spoke length range shifts slightly.
The problem here is that they used
14mm-length nipples from the CX-RAY accessory kit.
Depending on rim height and outer hole offset,
the longer the reversed nipple is,
the harder it is to grip firmly with the tool.
The diagram above shows a tubular rim, but
the recently-built 25mm-height Alchemy Lightweight wheel
uses 12mm DT Pro Lock nipples according to the manufacturer's assembly specs,
but even 12mm was tight to fully assemble
(we got it to decent tension after trial assembly),
so I switched to ENVE internal 10mm-length nipples
for the rebuild.
That 2mm difference is huge.
So, with reversed hole offset and forced assembly using long nipples,
there were traces that after trial assembly
the tool was only engaging shallowly with the nipple.
You can't tell with the wheel assembled,
but looking carefully at just the rim,
there's hole offset on the inner side too.
Looking from left to right in the image, it appears to offset
right, left, right, left, but
looking more carefully, it offsets center, left, center, left.
If the right and left offset amplitudes were equal,
the rim would have no left-right distinction, but
the freewheel-side hole doesn't offset horizontally at rim center,
so this rim does have left-right distinction.
↑This is a slightly blurry close-up, but
the left of the image shows the rim-center hole for freewheel-side spokes,
and the right shows an offset hole, so it's for non-freewheel-side spokes.
This is super important, but
I passed a #14 plain black straight spoke
through the rim-center freewheel-side spoke hole
and threaded it onto the nipple.
I leveled the rim horizontally
and measured how much it sags under its own weight.
You can see the silver sticker indicating the left side in the background of the image.
In other words, the state in the image above
means the side of the rim pointing down
is the side that would be the wheel's left side.
Since I'm running the spoke through the freewheel-side hole,
the direction the spoke sags is opposite to the intended trajectory.
From here, I flip the rim using the image's edges as a rotation axis.
The amount of spoke sag is dramatically different.
This would be routine if the rim holes had offset,
but the key point is that it's happening at what appears to be a center hole.
In other words, there's directionality built in
beyond just the hole offset on the rim holes themselves.
The original wheel committed not one but two errors:
getting the rim's left-right orientation wrong, AND
assembling a normal-orientation rim as if it were reverse-orientation.
So even if I hadn't changed the rim,
a rebuild was absolutely necessary.
The left-right rim mix-up is one thing (though it shouldn't be),
but there's a Gokiso-specific reason for the error
of treating a normal rim as reverse-oriented.
Let me recap what I mean by
normal-orientation vs. reverse-orientation rim:
When viewing an equal-sided-spoke-count wheel from the side,
there's a hub flange toward you (near side)
and one away from you (far side).
When rim holes have offset,
the vast majority of rims in the market
are designed so that the spoke coming from the far hub flange
goes into the hole that's clockwise from the valve hole
(when tracing holes clockwise from the valve)—
these are "normal-offset rims" (normal rims),
and those that don't follow this pattern are "reverse-offset rims" (reverse rims).
The diagram above is a normal rim.
This relationship holds even if you flip the rim.
Examples of reverse rims include
the front rim of Racing Zeros for rim brakes,
some Colima rims,
and what appears to be a manufacturing error in Formula Chrono 20 rims
from some periods of Ambrosio
(the 32H is normal while some 28H versions are reverse),
and Duke-brand IT wheel rims
(other Duke rims are normal) for unknown reasons.
↑Those were assembled as normal rims
by someone who didn't know better.
Also, Reynolds has carbon rims without hole offset
that are assembled as reverse rims on the front wheel only in some cases.
I built it as a left-right tangent-laced wheel.
Looking at the rear wheel from the right,
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 holes are offset incorrectly
while keeping the hub and spoke shapes unchanged,
and only the rim shifts by one hole space,
in both cases, the valve hole ends up
in the crotch of the final tangent crossing,
creating an ugly-looking wheel.
With single-side radial lacing
(non-freewheel side radial in this diagram),
only position B avoids the valve hole looking awkward
at its final crossing position.
So at first glance, it doesn't look like
the hole offset is wrong (reverse rim treatment).
In the diagram, viewing the wheel from the right with the valve hole at position B,
the adjacent spoke counterclockwise is a non-freewheel-side spoke from the far flange,
and the adjacent spoke clockwise is a freewheel-side spoke from the near flange,
↑and on the actual wheel viewed from the right with the valve hole,
the adjacent spoke counterclockwise is a non-freewheel-side spoke from the far flange,
and the adjacent spoke clockwise is a freewheel-side spoke from the near flange,
so it matched.
Non-freewheel-side radial lacing makes hole offset errors
harder to detect, so
this is a Gokiso-specific type of mistake—
but scraping the rim hole rim hard with the tool wrench
while the tool isn't fully seating on the nipple
and not noticing or choosing to force through the assembly anyway
is unacceptable either way.
Addendum: Something I forgot to write in the wheel article
Gokiso's factory-assembled complete wheels
have extremely high spoke tension.
With a wheel where spoke tension is adequate for the wheel to function,
if you loosen all nipples on both sides equally—say, one full turn each—
the lower the tension, the larger the tension drop per turn.
Conversely, once a wheel is already at high tension,
over-tightening nipples from there barely changes the feel.
With 24H wheels both fully built with CX-RAY
in 4-0 (44 spoke) and 4-4 (equal) rear wheel configurations,
starting from a state where "both have equal freewheel-side tension
and are centered,"
as you loosen all nipples equally on both wheels,
the 4-0 wheel with larger freewheel-side tension difference
will have the non-freewheel-side spokes become so loose
you can wiggle them side-to-side like a squishy toy
before a tension meter reading is even possible
(meter doesn't move from zero).
Say both wheels have all nipples loosened 4 full turns from final assembly—
the 4-4 wheel treated the same way
will still be squishy but not in the "you'll die if you ride it" category.
What I'm saying is:
with equal-sided-spoke rear wheels using non-freewheel-side radial lacing,
you have to crank the tension to absolutely maximum
to get the non-freewheel-side spokes past the squishy stage.
In contrast, Gokiso's hubs
are extremely hard materially—
the inpoke holes showed no bite marks from spoke seats.
There were only faint scratches on the hub flange sides
where spokes rubbed.
It was already like this, but
if I tried to align the hub shell phase with the logo
as visible through the valve hole,
the starting hole for the outpoke spoke on the freewheel side
matched between before and after rebuild.
The image on the right shows the former inpoke hole from the earlier image.
By the way, with 4-6 Italian lacing,
the first spoke is a "right drop" as shown.
↑After rebuild, looking through the valve hole in the rim, it looks like this
↑Front rim 20F no outer hole offset
↑Rear rim 24R with outer hole offset
The rim was absurdly heavy.
The rear rim had a weight difference as if it were an offset rim,
even though it's not an offset rim.
The weight difference was so extreme
I thought the scale wasn't zeroing when I weighed the rear rim,
so I lifted it to double-check.
This is a Gokiso custom rim, and
I can only think that to make their hub's rotation quality stand out
and to stage a more impressive magic trick—
for the manufacturer's own self-satisfaction—
they've made the rim heavy way beyond the range of normal products.
For wheels that are NOT Gokiso's factory-assembled complete wheels
but just built with their hubs,
I wouldn't be making this claim.
But for Gokiso's factory-assembled complete wheels specifically,
the absurd rim weight also contributes
to extending the spin time when doing the magic trick of
"put it on a stand and give it a flick,
and watch it keep spinning."
The speed boost on descents and the free-rolling feel on flats
when you stop pedaling are certainly good,
but I question whether people using this complete wheel
are aware of and accepting the rim's abnormal weight.
Products Mentioned in This Article
- 🛒 DT Swiss CX-RAY spoke
- 🛒 DT Swiss Pro Lock nipple
- 🛒 ENVE internal nipple 10mm
- 🛒 AXLightness tubular rim
* Amazon affiliate links — prices may vary
Original Japanese post: のむラボ日記 #7104