A customer brought in a Racing Zero rear wheel for repair.
It's from the era of tie spokes, but
The right flange of the hub is completely blown out.
The customer had acquired a Mega High-Low flange hub body and asked if we could rebuild the wheel with it.
Beyond just the flange diameter differences, the rim hole phasing changes from evenly spaced to having rest positions, which also affects spoke length. But with non-tie spokes like in the image above, the length should work out. We might be able to keep the freewheel-side spokes as tie spokes.
On the early Fulcrum aluminum spoke hub, the right flange has spokes crossing over in a specific way—you could say both spoke types hook on the outside of the flange. With this design, when replacing the non-freewheel-side spokes, you have to temporarily remove the freewheel-side spokes at the first crossing. But with the enlarged right flange, the freewheel-side spokes hook on the outside while the non-freewheel-side ones hook on the inside, making spoke replacement much easier.
On the early Fulcrum aluminum spoke hub, the left flange uses a hook design, and you can't remove the spokes without loosening the ball cup adjusting nut. The improved version adopted a puzzle-piece-like insertion system from the side, eliminating the need to touch the ball cup adjusting nut during spoke replacement.
On rear hubs from the era when they got carbon bodies like the Shamal Ultra (when they had white flanges), there was a transitional period where the right flange was the early type and the left flange was the improved type.
The Mega High-Low flange hub body had either ball bearings or silver cone washers pressed in for USB purposes. The condition is practically brand new.
The original rear wheel hub had black cone washers and black ball cup specifications. I'll transplant the parts around the hub axle while keeping the black ball cup.
The hook-type old left flange and the puzzle-piece-style new left flange have different shaped ball cup adjusting nuts.
The rear hub axle's left hollow end bolt and washer below its neck establish the 130mm over-locknut dimension. If we're not too concerned about water and dirt ingress, we shouldn't have any issues building the wheel as long as we get the hub ball cup adjustment right.
I temporarily built the wheel with 14 non-tie spokes on the freewheel side and 7 original spokes on the non-freewheel side, got rid of most of the lateral runout, and tensioned them moderately. By "moderate tension," I mean tensioning just enough so the spoke heads don't pop out of the left flange. For the non-freewheel-side spokes, I didn't loosen or tighten the nipples at all—I just released the hooks to disassemble the wheel and transferred them to the new hub.
This is the temporary centering at that point. The rim is badly off-center toward the freewheel side.
If I could center the wheel by tightening the nipples on these non-freewheel-side tie spokes until the cylindrical part becomes flush with the inner edge of the nipple, I could reuse the spokes. But there's no way that's going to happen, so we ended up needing to replace the non-freewheel-side spokes too. This means a complete spoke swap. Whether it's worth all this effort is the customer's decision, but given the sunk costs of acquiring the hub body and so on, giving up wasn't really an option. We proceeded with building the wheel.
After replacing all the spokes and finishing the wheel build, the centering was spot-on.
I replaced the ball cup adjusting nut with one that fits the hub.
Only one of three fixing bolts on the left spoke head retaining cap was present. These aren't sold individually, but
I procured them.
After putting the rear hub left-side parts in proper condition, when I checked the centering with a centering gauge without changing the measurement setting, both measured spot-on. The wedge-shaped centering washer used in the ball cup adjustment won't budge its dimensions unless we release its bite, so this result was inevitable.
Done.
The original rear wheel used evenly-spaced rim holes with a 2:1 lacing pattern (Ж-pattern). Fulcrum's rest-position rear wheel uses half the non-freewheel-side spokes removed from a standard 28H rear wheel, but whether we do right-rest-right-left (XI-pattern) or right-left-right-rest (Ж-pattern), the final crossing angle of the freewheel-side tangent lacing doesn't change at all. So we can't treat it the same as those stupid wheels doing XI-pattern lacing on evenly-spaced rim holes. But visually speaking, the old rear hub is Ж-pattern and the new rear hub is XI-pattern—that's a fact. So there's no avoiding the situation where the valve hole ends up between the freewheel-side tangent lacing, as shown above.
There's an even trickier issue: this rim's freewheel-side spoke holes have a strong directional bias for freewheel-side and non-freewheel-side orientation, but since we're building a Ж-pattern rim with an XI-pattern hub, we're building the wheel contrary to that directionality. Normally I wouldn't do such a thing, but I went along with the customer's request to get the rear wheel usable by any means necessary.
It's from the era of tie spokes, but
The right flange of the hub is completely blown out.
The customer had acquired a Mega High-Low flange hub body and asked if we could rebuild the wheel with it.
Beyond just the flange diameter differences, the rim hole phasing changes from evenly spaced to having rest positions, which also affects spoke length. But with non-tie spokes like in the image above, the length should work out. We might be able to keep the freewheel-side spokes as tie spokes.
On the early Fulcrum aluminum spoke hub, the right flange has spokes crossing over in a specific way—you could say both spoke types hook on the outside of the flange. With this design, when replacing the non-freewheel-side spokes, you have to temporarily remove the freewheel-side spokes at the first crossing. But with the enlarged right flange, the freewheel-side spokes hook on the outside while the non-freewheel-side ones hook on the inside, making spoke replacement much easier.
On the early Fulcrum aluminum spoke hub, the left flange uses a hook design, and you can't remove the spokes without loosening the ball cup adjusting nut. The improved version adopted a puzzle-piece-like insertion system from the side, eliminating the need to touch the ball cup adjusting nut during spoke replacement.
On rear hubs from the era when they got carbon bodies like the Shamal Ultra (when they had white flanges), there was a transitional period where the right flange was the early type and the left flange was the improved type.
The Mega High-Low flange hub body had either ball bearings or silver cone washers pressed in for USB purposes. The condition is practically brand new.
The original rear wheel hub had black cone washers and black ball cup specifications. I'll transplant the parts around the hub axle while keeping the black ball cup.
The hook-type old left flange and the puzzle-piece-style new left flange have different shaped ball cup adjusting nuts.
The rear hub axle's left hollow end bolt and washer below its neck establish the 130mm over-locknut dimension. If we're not too concerned about water and dirt ingress, we shouldn't have any issues building the wheel as long as we get the hub ball cup adjustment right.
I temporarily built the wheel with 14 non-tie spokes on the freewheel side and 7 original spokes on the non-freewheel side, got rid of most of the lateral runout, and tensioned them moderately. By "moderate tension," I mean tensioning just enough so the spoke heads don't pop out of the left flange. For the non-freewheel-side spokes, I didn't loosen or tighten the nipples at all—I just released the hooks to disassemble the wheel and transferred them to the new hub.
This is the temporary centering at that point. The rim is badly off-center toward the freewheel side.
If I could center the wheel by tightening the nipples on these non-freewheel-side tie spokes until the cylindrical part becomes flush with the inner edge of the nipple, I could reuse the spokes. But there's no way that's going to happen, so we ended up needing to replace the non-freewheel-side spokes too. This means a complete spoke swap. Whether it's worth all this effort is the customer's decision, but given the sunk costs of acquiring the hub body and so on, giving up wasn't really an option. We proceeded with building the wheel.
After replacing all the spokes and finishing the wheel build, the centering was spot-on.
I replaced the ball cup adjusting nut with one that fits the hub.
Only one of three fixing bolts on the left spoke head retaining cap was present. These aren't sold individually, but
I procured them.
After putting the rear hub left-side parts in proper condition, when I checked the centering with a centering gauge without changing the measurement setting, both measured spot-on. The wedge-shaped centering washer used in the ball cup adjustment won't budge its dimensions unless we release its bite, so this result was inevitable.
Done.
The original rear wheel used evenly-spaced rim holes with a 2:1 lacing pattern (Ж-pattern). Fulcrum's rest-position rear wheel uses half the non-freewheel-side spokes removed from a standard 28H rear wheel, but whether we do right-rest-right-left (XI-pattern) or right-left-right-rest (Ж-pattern), the final crossing angle of the freewheel-side tangent lacing doesn't change at all. So we can't treat it the same as those stupid wheels doing XI-pattern lacing on evenly-spaced rim holes. But visually speaking, the old rear hub is Ж-pattern and the new rear hub is XI-pattern—that's a fact. So there's no avoiding the situation where the valve hole ends up between the freewheel-side tangent lacing, as shown above.
There's an even trickier issue: this rim's freewheel-side spoke holes have a strong directional bias for freewheel-side and non-freewheel-side orientation, but since we're building a Ж-pattern rim with an XI-pattern hub, we're building the wheel contrary to that directionality. Normally I wouldn't do such a thing, but I went along with the customer's request to get the rear wheel usable by any means necessary.