Wheels again today (and so on).
A customer brought me a Velocity small-flange rim and
a wheel built with a Chris King hub. They want me to build a wheel using this hub with some recommended 700C rim and silver spokes with silver nipples, so I'm building Nomulab Wheel No. 5. For the Velocity rim, they want it built with just some decent hub, but since the current setup is all-black Campagnolo 28H JIS-laced and they prefer black spokes for the next wheel too, I carefully disassembled the wheel and tried to distinguish between the original drive-side spokes and non-drive-side spokes to reuse them, but
↑the front wheel spoke length is about 2 threads short of the nipple slot,
↑and on the rear wheel freewheel side, while the spokes in the image are about 1 thread short, most are nearly flush,
↑on the non-drive side they were using the same spoke length throughout, so they're 4-5 threads short of the nipple slot. Since the next Chris King hub likely won't have a significantly larger flange (the spoke length would actually get shorter depending on lacing), these spokes are too short to reuse. I also considered using the 28 non-drive-side spokes from both wheels for radial lacing on the front wheel, but since radial lacing from about 28H and up makes the hub shell harder to clean (24H is acceptable though), I decided there was no point in reusing the spokes, so I relieved some tension and discarded them.
Built.
R45 hub, 28H, all CX-RAY Italian 4-cross lacing. The issue of the hub shell being hard to clean with radial lacing at 28H and above isn't performance-related, but with 700C rims, if you do radial lacing at 32H and above, you're more likely to get spokes that are so loose when you pinch them with your fingers that they move back and forth. So this time, even though it's 28H, not 32H, I went with tangential lacing. A customer who came in today told me, "When I built a wheel with DT Revolution spokes, it started doing the 'wonky wobble' around 90 kgf and was a real pain." But as the number of spokes decreases on the same rim, the tension required per spoke increases, so fewer spokes tend to develop wonky wobble more easily. For example, with Nomulab Wheel No. 5 rim, there are both 32H and 20H (about 2/3 the hole count), but if you build a 20H rim wheel with the same slack spoke tension that barely makes a 32H rim wheel work, it won't work as a wheel at all. In other words, you can't build a 28H or 32H radial laced front wheel at the same tension as a 20H radial laced front wheel (and you don't). That gap where you need to reduce tension somewhat for the 20H compared to the 28H or 32H is where "one spoke becomes really loose and floppy" can happen. Of course, I do take measures to prevent this as much as possible, so it rarely happens.
A customer brought me a Velocity small-flange rim and
a wheel built with a Chris King hub. They want me to build a wheel using this hub with some recommended 700C rim and silver spokes with silver nipples, so I'm building Nomulab Wheel No. 5. For the Velocity rim, they want it built with just some decent hub, but since the current setup is all-black Campagnolo 28H JIS-laced and they prefer black spokes for the next wheel too, I carefully disassembled the wheel and tried to distinguish between the original drive-side spokes and non-drive-side spokes to reuse them, but
↑the front wheel spoke length is about 2 threads short of the nipple slot,
↑and on the rear wheel freewheel side, while the spokes in the image are about 1 thread short, most are nearly flush,
↑on the non-drive side they were using the same spoke length throughout, so they're 4-5 threads short of the nipple slot. Since the next Chris King hub likely won't have a significantly larger flange (the spoke length would actually get shorter depending on lacing), these spokes are too short to reuse. I also considered using the 28 non-drive-side spokes from both wheels for radial lacing on the front wheel, but since radial lacing from about 28H and up makes the hub shell harder to clean (24H is acceptable though), I decided there was no point in reusing the spokes, so I relieved some tension and discarded them.
Built.
R45 hub, 28H, all CX-RAY Italian 4-cross lacing. The issue of the hub shell being hard to clean with radial lacing at 28H and above isn't performance-related, but with 700C rims, if you do radial lacing at 32H and above, you're more likely to get spokes that are so loose when you pinch them with your fingers that they move back and forth. So this time, even though it's 28H, not 32H, I went with tangential lacing. A customer who came in today told me, "When I built a wheel with DT Revolution spokes, it started doing the 'wonky wobble' around 90 kgf and was a real pain." But as the number of spokes decreases on the same rim, the tension required per spoke increases, so fewer spokes tend to develop wonky wobble more easily. For example, with Nomulab Wheel No. 5 rim, there are both 32H and 20H (about 2/3 the hole count), but if you build a 20H rim wheel with the same slack spoke tension that barely makes a 32H rim wheel work, it won't work as a wheel at all. In other words, you can't build a 28H or 32H radial laced front wheel at the same tension as a 20H radial laced front wheel (and you don't). That gap where you need to reduce tension somewhat for the 20H compared to the 28H or 32H is where "one spoke becomes really loose and floppy" can happen. Of course, I do take measures to prevent this as much as possible, so it rarely happens.