A customer brought in the rear wheel
from an ENVE 45 Foundation for repair.
The chain had dropped inside the sprocket cluster
and bent some spokes, so they asked me to straighten them out.
I have three pieces of evidence that this is
an in-house manufactured wheel from the maker.
First: it's laced in reverse Italian.
Basically only Americans do this kind of thing.
Besides that, PowerTap's American in-house wheels
are also laced reverse Italian.
Second: underneath the rim tape on the outer rim surface,
there's a non-removable label embedded with
the wheel builder's name.
Third: I'll explain that later.
One advantage of reverse Italian lacing is that
when the chain drops,
only the outpokes on the anti-freewheel side
bear pretty much all the damage,
and the hub flanges remain
almost completely unscratched.
This time too, it turned out I only needed to replace
those six outpokes.
By the way, we're the only shop that can fix
this wheel on the spot as soon as it walks in (probably).
It's fixed.
Here's something wild: this wheel has different sized sides!
The freewheel side uses black CX Sprint,
while the anti-freewheel side uses black CX-RAY.
And since the freewheel-side spoke length was 271mm,
the CX Sprint that can be machined to 310–270mm isdue to hoarding
currently out of stock at the Sapim distributor,
and while it might be possible to source it as an ENVE spare spoke,
it's hard to imagine a shop stocking that,
so we're probably the only place that can improvise the spokes right away.
Even if some shop had spokes on hand,
many shops wouldn't be able to fix it on the spot
↑A 271mm CX Sprint cut here in our shop
The nominal length is actually 272mm,
but the rim has thin walls on the inner side,
and the spoke threads were just barely bottoming out
against where the nipple threads begin,
so I deliberately cut it shorter.
Whether you go with 271mm or 272mm,
the length of the 2.0mm diameter round section
sticking out from the rim stays the same when assembled
(as long as the spoke is long enough to build the wheel).
If this wheel's spokes happened to be
310mm instead,
the round section protruding from the rim would look
incredibly long visually,
but since I cut the 270mm-capable spoke to 271mm,
it ends up looking similar to
what you'd get using the maker's off-the-shelf spokes.
↑Here's an off-the-shelf CX Sprint.
Interestingly, this one's round section
actually sticks out longer.
↑This is the anti-freewheel side spoke—
a special-order CX-RAY used in ENVE complete wheels,
where the section between the end of the threads
and the start of the batter is squared off
to serve as a grip point for tools.
The fact that this isn't sold to the general public
is the third piece of evidence that this is
an in-house manufactured wheel.
I've never seen a squared-off version
of the CX Sprint.
The Japanese distributor sites only list
the spokes on this wheel as CX Sprint,
but the anti-freewheel side spokes are definitely CX-RAY.
↑The replaced spokes
I held the butted section in place and lined them up,
then shot the outside of the inpokes.
There were rub marks at the final crossing.
You can't really avoid those marks no matter how much
you crank up spoke tension,
but separate from that, despite ENVE making a rim
that tensions up really well, the spoke tension was so low
it was clearly slacked beyond just age-related sagging—
so I said "I know more tension isn't always better,
but this is clearly slack, so could I tighten it up a bit more?"
and after getting the okay, I did a more-than-reset retensioning.
Bonus
This image is unrelated to the ENVE wheel in this post—
it's from the 303S rear wheel I worked on the other day.
This is a 2592×1944 pixel image
compressed to 640×480 pixels, but
a crop of the original to 640×480 size is
↑this one.
There were minor chain-drop marks on the freewheel-side inpokes
of the JIS-laced build,
but since there were no gouging-type scratches,
I reused them as-is.
from an ENVE 45 Foundation for repair.
The chain had dropped inside the sprocket cluster
and bent some spokes, so they asked me to straighten them out.
I have three pieces of evidence that this is
an in-house manufactured wheel from the maker.
First: it's laced in reverse Italian.
Basically only Americans do this kind of thing.
Besides that, PowerTap's American in-house wheels
are also laced reverse Italian.
Second: underneath the rim tape on the outer rim surface,
there's a non-removable label embedded with
the wheel builder's name.
Third: I'll explain that later.
One advantage of reverse Italian lacing is that
when the chain drops,
only the outpokes on the anti-freewheel side
bear pretty much all the damage,
and the hub flanges remain
almost completely unscratched.
This time too, it turned out I only needed to replace
those six outpokes.
By the way, we're the only shop that can fix
this wheel on the spot as soon as it walks in (probably).
It's fixed.
Here's something wild: this wheel has different sized sides!
The freewheel side uses black CX Sprint,
while the anti-freewheel side uses black CX-RAY.
And since the freewheel-side spoke length was 271mm,
the CX Sprint that can be machined to 310–270mm is
currently out of stock at the Sapim distributor,
and while it might be possible to source it as an ENVE spare spoke,
it's hard to imagine a shop stocking that,
so we're probably the only place that can improvise the spokes right away.
many shops wouldn't be able to fix it on the spot
↑A 271mm CX Sprint cut here in our shop
The nominal length is actually 272mm,
but the rim has thin walls on the inner side,
and the spoke threads were just barely bottoming out
against where the nipple threads begin,
so I deliberately cut it shorter.
Whether you go with 271mm or 272mm,
the length of the 2.0mm diameter round section
sticking out from the rim stays the same when assembled
(as long as the spoke is long enough to build the wheel).
If this wheel's spokes happened to be
310mm instead,
the round section protruding from the rim would look
incredibly long visually,
but since I cut the 270mm-capable spoke to 271mm,
it ends up looking similar to
what you'd get using the maker's off-the-shelf spokes.
↑Here's an off-the-shelf CX Sprint.
Interestingly, this one's round section
actually sticks out longer.
↑This is the anti-freewheel side spoke—
a special-order CX-RAY used in ENVE complete wheels,
where the section between the end of the threads
and the start of the batter is squared off
to serve as a grip point for tools.
The fact that this isn't sold to the general public
is the third piece of evidence that this is
an in-house manufactured wheel.
I've never seen a squared-off version
of the CX Sprint.
The Japanese distributor sites only list
the spokes on this wheel as CX Sprint,
but the anti-freewheel side spokes are definitely CX-RAY.
↑The replaced spokes
I held the butted section in place and lined them up,
then shot the outside of the inpokes.
There were rub marks at the final crossing.
You can't really avoid those marks no matter how much
you crank up spoke tension,
but separate from that, despite ENVE making a rim
that tensions up really well, the spoke tension was so low
it was clearly slacked beyond just age-related sagging—
so I said "I know more tension isn't always better,
but this is clearly slack, so could I tighten it up a bit more?"
and after getting the okay, I did a more-than-reset retensioning.
Bonus
This image is unrelated to the ENVE wheel in this post—
it's from the 303S rear wheel I worked on the other day.
This is a 2592×1944 pixel image
compressed to 640×480 pixels, but
a crop of the original to 640×480 size is
↑this one.
There were minor chain-drop marks on the freewheel-side inpokes
of the JIS-laced build,
but since there were no gouging-type scratches,
I reused them as-is.