Another day with wheels (and so on).
A customer brought in a rear wheel from a Rolf Vector Pro.
The hub shell has split clean in half.
Apparently there was already a crack in the flange hole on the freewheel side, which the customer knew about. They'd left the wheel unused, but spoke tension gradually pulled the crack open until the hub shell finally fractured.
In my experience, I've never seen a spoke head pop out in cases like this.
The rim has wear marks in the brake zone, but nothing you'd notice by touch.
Separately, the customer also brought in another Vector Pro rear wheel in the same color with matching labels. Since they run Campagnolo components, this other rear wheel has a Campagnolo freewheel body and sprockets. They may have sourced a wheel with a Shimano freewheel body and transferred the freewheel body from the cracked hub to it.
It's hard to see in photos, but this rim is dished and worn in a curved pattern. There's no lateral runout, so technically it could still be used, but it's definitely better to do a "nikomi" transplant—pairing the rim from the first Vector Pro with this hub.
Since I don't want to risk the hub shell cracking again, I'm going to rebuild the spoke tension on the freewheel side of this rear wheel and finish the wheel build with that.
Rolf rear hubs use a reverse high-low flange design, where the freewheel-side spokes are actually longer. For the hub dimensions, the left-right spoke tensions seemed pretty similar, which I thought was odd until—
—it turned out the rim was just massively dished away from the freewheel side. The customer had not only acquired this rear wheel but was using it too. When they swapped in a different rear wheel, brake adjustment was necessary. Which, of course it was.
Even so, when I rebuild and finish this wheel, the freewheel-side spoke tension will follow this wheel's current state, so the non-freewheel-side tension will be lower than before. I can't tighten the freewheel side enough to take up all that dish. That's true from a tension standpoint, but also—
—the Vector Pro spokes are sized so the rim is right at the point where the spoke butting begins, so tensioning any tighter wouldn't be ideal.
This appearance occurs because Rolf wheels use dramatically few spokes—14H front, 16H rear—with paired spokes, and because the rim's inner sidewall is quite thick.
Rims on wheels like the Racing Zero or Kシリウム (Kysyrium) have machining that thins the rim except around the nipple area, but this rim is equally thick all the way around, so the rim weight is substantial. I'm not telling you exactly how heavy it is though.
↑wow, I'm being a jerk
Sorry for the wait! Please look at this image!
This is the worn rim!
This is the non-worn rim (after rebuild)!
↑stoppppp!
...I think something just happened, but let's not dwell on it.
The spokes turned out to be DT (Dichtung Technik) from their raised-emboss era. I thought they might be a custom 120% specific gravity model, but calculating from the length and weight, I got 1.00348143..., so about 100.3%—which is essentially the same as Sapim CX, so they're a standard off-the-shelf repair item.
The spoke length is right at the edge of what CX offers, but the black spoke spec isn't available from wholesalers—only silver spokes come in.
The worn rim isn't unusable, and since the spokes from the wheel with the cracked hub can also be used as spare parts for the customer, future repairs are well-covered. The only thing I'm afraid of is the hub cracking again, so I'm adhering strictly to the original spoke tension.
The internal nipples with hexagonal wrench flats—the distance across flats is not 5mm, but 3/16 inch (4.7625mm).
This is the same dimension as the hexagonal aluminum nipples on the first and second generation EDGE and ENVE wheels, but I can say with near-certainty that many of these have been turned with a 5mm wrench. The tool above is Park Tool, and their spoke wrench tools use the SW product number prefix—they have 3.2mm square and 5mm, 5.5mm, and 6mm hex driver-style tools numbered SW16–19 respectively, while this tool is SW16.3, literally named after its dimension.
But anyway, I've never before seen one where the side touching the rim is so crushed that a tool can't fit in from the opposite side.
↑the outer side looks like this
Rim relocation in progress...
Built.
When you align both rims' valve holes and line them up—
—there's an orientation where the label markings line up perfectly, and—
—an orientation where they don't. This has significant meaning.
Looking at the final left-right cross of four spokes, the rim holes in this image range have the outer hole on the freewheel side for both. If we call freewheel side "right," the rim hole orientation is right-left-left-right.
Going back in timeline before the rim relocation, the image above shows what happens when rims are lined up with matching valve holes but in the wrong orientation. The rim hole patterns don't match.
This is the correct orientation. The rim hole patterns match.
For anyone relocating a Rolf rim in the future, please pay attention to this point.
A customer brought in a rear wheel from a Rolf Vector Pro.
The hub shell has split clean in half.
Apparently there was already a crack in the flange hole on the freewheel side, which the customer knew about. They'd left the wheel unused, but spoke tension gradually pulled the crack open until the hub shell finally fractured.
In my experience, I've never seen a spoke head pop out in cases like this.
The rim has wear marks in the brake zone, but nothing you'd notice by touch.
Separately, the customer also brought in another Vector Pro rear wheel in the same color with matching labels. Since they run Campagnolo components, this other rear wheel has a Campagnolo freewheel body and sprockets. They may have sourced a wheel with a Shimano freewheel body and transferred the freewheel body from the cracked hub to it.
It's hard to see in photos, but this rim is dished and worn in a curved pattern. There's no lateral runout, so technically it could still be used, but it's definitely better to do a "nikomi" transplant—pairing the rim from the first Vector Pro with this hub.
Since I don't want to risk the hub shell cracking again, I'm going to rebuild the spoke tension on the freewheel side of this rear wheel and finish the wheel build with that.
Rolf rear hubs use a reverse high-low flange design, where the freewheel-side spokes are actually longer. For the hub dimensions, the left-right spoke tensions seemed pretty similar, which I thought was odd until—
—it turned out the rim was just massively dished away from the freewheel side. The customer had not only acquired this rear wheel but was using it too. When they swapped in a different rear wheel, brake adjustment was necessary. Which, of course it was.
Even so, when I rebuild and finish this wheel, the freewheel-side spoke tension will follow this wheel's current state, so the non-freewheel-side tension will be lower than before. I can't tighten the freewheel side enough to take up all that dish. That's true from a tension standpoint, but also—
—the Vector Pro spokes are sized so the rim is right at the point where the spoke butting begins, so tensioning any tighter wouldn't be ideal.
This appearance occurs because Rolf wheels use dramatically few spokes—14H front, 16H rear—with paired spokes, and because the rim's inner sidewall is quite thick.
Rims on wheels like the Racing Zero or Kシリウム (Kysyrium) have machining that thins the rim except around the nipple area, but this rim is equally thick all the way around, so the rim weight is substantial. I'm not telling you exactly how heavy it is though.
↑wow, I'm being a jerk
Sorry for the wait! Please look at this image!
This is the worn rim!
This is the non-worn rim (after rebuild)!
↑stoppppp!
...I think something just happened, but let's not dwell on it.
The spokes turned out to be DT (Dichtung Technik) from their raised-emboss era. I thought they might be a custom 120% specific gravity model, but calculating from the length and weight, I got 1.00348143..., so about 100.3%—which is essentially the same as Sapim CX, so they're a standard off-the-shelf repair item.
The spoke length is right at the edge of what CX offers, but the black spoke spec isn't available from wholesalers—only silver spokes come in.
The worn rim isn't unusable, and since the spokes from the wheel with the cracked hub can also be used as spare parts for the customer, future repairs are well-covered. The only thing I'm afraid of is the hub cracking again, so I'm adhering strictly to the original spoke tension.
The internal nipples with hexagonal wrench flats—the distance across flats is not 5mm, but 3/16 inch (4.7625mm).
This is the same dimension as the hexagonal aluminum nipples on the first and second generation EDGE and ENVE wheels, but I can say with near-certainty that many of these have been turned with a 5mm wrench. The tool above is Park Tool, and their spoke wrench tools use the SW product number prefix—they have 3.2mm square and 5mm, 5.5mm, and 6mm hex driver-style tools numbered SW16–19 respectively, while this tool is SW16.3, literally named after its dimension.
But anyway, I've never before seen one where the side touching the rim is so crushed that a tool can't fit in from the opposite side.
↑the outer side looks like this
Rim relocation in progress...
Built.
When you align both rims' valve holes and line them up—
—there's an orientation where the label markings line up perfectly, and—
—an orientation where they don't. This has significant meaning.
Looking at the final left-right cross of four spokes, the rim holes in this image range have the outer hole on the freewheel side for both. If we call freewheel side "right," the rim hole orientation is right-left-left-right.
Going back in timeline before the rim relocation, the image above shows what happens when rims are lined up with matching valve holes but in the wrong orientation. The rim hole patterns don't match.
This is the correct orientation. The rim hole patterns match.
For anyone relocating a Rolf rim in the future, please pay attention to this point.