Another wheel day (and so on).
A customer dropped off a front wheel from Elite, the wheel brand (unrelated to the Elite bottle cage brand).
It's a wheel built with the same carbon spokes used in HUNT's carbon spoke wheels.
The rim has what looks like a Campagnolo AC3 treatment in the brake zone, but the bead hook has been deformed by buckling. Carbon rims are extremely strong against buckling when cold, so since disc brakes became widespread, this type of damage has become virtually nonexistent.
↑It looks like this when I tape it for visibility, so rim replacement was necessary, but what the customer brought in was
a completely different rim—only matching in rim height. Well, I was the one who said a rim with the same height could be swapped, but I overlooked one important thing.
↑The rim on top in the image is the original, and the one below is for the swap. The original rim has a large hole runout on the outer edge of the rim holes.
↑What appears as aluminum nipple here is actually the grip area for preventing slip when turning the internal nipple.
I've mentioned this many times before, but normal nipples are equivalent to nuts (female threads), while this carbon spoke nipple-like part has bolt threads (male threads).
This grip area—since the carbon spokes have an elliptical aero shape, ideally the square flat surface of the grip should be oriented perfectly sideways when the spoke is in the correct flattened direction. But apparently they don't care, and they're pretty scattered. In the image above, it's rotated roughly 45 degrees, which means the tool insertion angle changes with each spoke, and that's annoying.
↑This is the structure. You adjust by holding down the 3.4mm grip area (not 3.2mm) while turning the 6mm hex.
I disassembled and removed about a half turn plus of spokes.
The hub and spoke head relationship is hook-type, so after this
I can detach the spoke head from the hub flange and remove the hub.
The hole diameter on the inner edge of this rim is no different from standard rims, but with steel straight spokes you'd normally be able to pull the nippled spoke out from the outside. With these carbon spokes, though, the aluminum head section has a larger diameter, so that's impossible. So I need to remove the nipples from all the spokes.
The thing I overlooked was whether the wheel could actually be built with a rim that has no outer edge runout, given that the tool grasping the 6mm hex approaches at an angle from the outside of the rim.
The timeline jumps a bit here, but I managed to make it work. If the rim height had been 25mm or something, the wheel might not have been buildable.
Like with Racing Zero rim replacements and such, I first set the spokes with thread engagement on the nipples to the rim. When I look at the spokes with the hook released from the state where about half a turn plus had been removed, there was about 2 turns of thread remaining, but now all of them show roughly 6 turns of thread. If you get too greedy, the spokes won't hook onto the hub flange.
I hooked all spokes on one side.
I hooked all spokes on the other side too. Roughly speaking, tightening all nipples by 4 turns from here should get us close to the finished state. This carbon spoke doesn't come with a conversion table, but I've taken the H1ST (first spoke tension) reading with a Hozan tension meter, so finishing just slightly higher than that should be fine.
Built! I forgot to mention it's 18H. Like HUNT's carbon spoke complete wheels, this original wheel also has a rim that's not particularly light. Or you could even say it's heavy. The original rim also has the same inner diameter holes as standard rims, but since the contact area between nipple and rim is wide, a rim for these carbon spokes doesn't need to be specially robust. So I can't defend the rim not being light by saying "we deliberately made it heavy because it uses these carbon spokes!"
The customer probably didn't know the weight of the original rim, but they apparently chose a light one for the swap, so it ended up about 90g lighter. What? You want me to tell you the specific weights? No way I'm telling you that easily.
↑man, this guy's got a bad attitude
Sorry for the wait! What? Looks like I recycled the previous post?
This part is different! But anyway
Before and after rim swap! ↑Stooooop!
A customer dropped off a front wheel from Elite, the wheel brand (unrelated to the Elite bottle cage brand).
It's a wheel built with the same carbon spokes used in HUNT's carbon spoke wheels.
The rim has what looks like a Campagnolo AC3 treatment in the brake zone, but the bead hook has been deformed by buckling. Carbon rims are extremely strong against buckling when cold, so since disc brakes became widespread, this type of damage has become virtually nonexistent.
↑It looks like this when I tape it for visibility, so rim replacement was necessary, but what the customer brought in was
a completely different rim—only matching in rim height. Well, I was the one who said a rim with the same height could be swapped, but I overlooked one important thing.
↑The rim on top in the image is the original, and the one below is for the swap. The original rim has a large hole runout on the outer edge of the rim holes.
↑What appears as aluminum nipple here is actually the grip area for preventing slip when turning the internal nipple.
I've mentioned this many times before, but normal nipples are equivalent to nuts (female threads), while this carbon spoke nipple-like part has bolt threads (male threads).
This grip area—since the carbon spokes have an elliptical aero shape, ideally the square flat surface of the grip should be oriented perfectly sideways when the spoke is in the correct flattened direction. But apparently they don't care, and they're pretty scattered. In the image above, it's rotated roughly 45 degrees, which means the tool insertion angle changes with each spoke, and that's annoying.
↑This is the structure. You adjust by holding down the 3.4mm grip area (not 3.2mm) while turning the 6mm hex.
I disassembled and removed about a half turn plus of spokes.
The hub and spoke head relationship is hook-type, so after this
I can detach the spoke head from the hub flange and remove the hub.
The hole diameter on the inner edge of this rim is no different from standard rims, but with steel straight spokes you'd normally be able to pull the nippled spoke out from the outside. With these carbon spokes, though, the aluminum head section has a larger diameter, so that's impossible. So I need to remove the nipples from all the spokes.
The thing I overlooked was whether the wheel could actually be built with a rim that has no outer edge runout, given that the tool grasping the 6mm hex approaches at an angle from the outside of the rim.
The timeline jumps a bit here, but I managed to make it work. If the rim height had been 25mm or something, the wheel might not have been buildable.
Like with Racing Zero rim replacements and such, I first set the spokes with thread engagement on the nipples to the rim. When I look at the spokes with the hook released from the state where about half a turn plus had been removed, there was about 2 turns of thread remaining, but now all of them show roughly 6 turns of thread. If you get too greedy, the spokes won't hook onto the hub flange.
I hooked all spokes on one side.
I hooked all spokes on the other side too. Roughly speaking, tightening all nipples by 4 turns from here should get us close to the finished state. This carbon spoke doesn't come with a conversion table, but I've taken the H1ST (first spoke tension) reading with a Hozan tension meter, so finishing just slightly higher than that should be fine.
Built! I forgot to mention it's 18H. Like HUNT's carbon spoke complete wheels, this original wheel also has a rim that's not particularly light. Or you could even say it's heavy. The original rim also has the same inner diameter holes as standard rims, but since the contact area between nipple and rim is wide, a rim for these carbon spokes doesn't need to be specially robust. So I can't defend the rim not being light by saying "we deliberately made it heavy because it uses these carbon spokes!"
The customer probably didn't know the weight of the original rim, but they apparently chose a light one for the swap, so it ended up about 90g lighter. What? You want me to tell you the specific weights? No way I'm telling you that easily.
↑man, this guy's got a bad attitude
Sorry for the wait! What? Looks like I recycled the previous post?
This part is different! But anyway
Before and after rim swap! ↑Stooooop!