More wheel building today (and so on).
I built the rear wheel for Nomu Lab Wheel #1 with a 7400 hub.
28 hole, semi-comp 46-spoke lacing pattern with crossing, and red aluminum nipples.
Like the front wheel, the hub was brand new.
The hub is not an FH-7400 series hub.
FH stands for freehub, after all.
This hub is an HB-7400-R, a drum brake hub.
On a hub with dish (offset),
there's naturally a difference in spoke tension between left and right,
but the narrowness of the right flange
is far more of a negative factor
than the width of the left flange.
When the right spoke angle is very steep
(especially when building with equal diameter and equal spoke count left and right)
spoke tension quickly reaches near the rim's upper limit,
leaving the left spokes slack.
Even a 1mm difference in right flange width is noticeable when building wheels,
but this 7400 hub has
a right flange width about 4mm wider
compared to recent freehubs.
That said, this hub isn't superior compared to drum brakes in general—
drum brakes in general just happen to have dimensions around this size.
Structurally, this rear wheel
is superior to rear wheels I build with Evolite hubs or 660 hubs,
and superior to nearly all complete disc brake wheelsets
(within the scope of steel spoke wheels).
However, with drum brakes, except in special cases,
the maximum number of sprocket teeth is 8 speeds.
No matter how superior the wheel's engineering,
there's the problem of whether you can still be satisfied with 8-speed in this day and age!
So through freebody conversion,
I've naturally increased sprocket counts,
and I'd say we could truly call it "natural" progression
up to the 9000 series (max 28T) with 11-speed options like 11-23T or 12-25T
(both having 18T in addition to 16T),
but after that, while counts appear to increase,
in a sense they're not really increasing—a topic I wrote about
a little while back (→here).
I built the rear wheel for Nomu Lab Wheel #1 with a 7400 hub.
28 hole, semi-comp 46-spoke lacing pattern with crossing, and red aluminum nipples.
Like the front wheel, the hub was brand new.
The hub is not an FH-7400 series hub.
FH stands for freehub, after all.
This hub is an HB-7400-R, a drum brake hub.
On a hub with dish (offset),
there's naturally a difference in spoke tension between left and right,
but the narrowness of the right flange
is far more of a negative factor
than the width of the left flange.
When the right spoke angle is very steep
(especially when building with equal diameter and equal spoke count left and right)
spoke tension quickly reaches near the rim's upper limit,
leaving the left spokes slack.
Even a 1mm difference in right flange width is noticeable when building wheels,
but this 7400 hub has
a right flange width about 4mm wider
compared to recent freehubs.
That said, this hub isn't superior compared to drum brakes in general—
drum brakes in general just happen to have dimensions around this size.
Structurally, this rear wheel
is superior to rear wheels I build with Evolite hubs or 660 hubs,
and superior to nearly all complete disc brake wheelsets
(within the scope of steel spoke wheels).
However, with drum brakes, except in special cases,
the maximum number of sprocket teeth is 8 speeds.
No matter how superior the wheel's engineering,
there's the problem of whether you can still be satisfied with 8-speed in this day and age!
So through freebody conversion,
I've naturally increased sprocket counts,
and I'd say we could truly call it "natural" progression
up to the 9000 series (max 28T) with 11-speed options like 11-23T or 12-25T
(both having 18T in addition to 16T),
but after that, while counts appear to increase,
in a sense they're not really increasing—a topic I wrote about
a little while back (→here).