Another wheel day (and so on).
Built a front wheel with
Gryphon Tack's 30mm high tubular rim.
Revo disc hub, 24H, semi CX Sprint
64 reverse Italian lacing.
I'll do the spoke wrapping later.
With this customer's previously built wheels,
when I increased the spoke tension variance,
they said it felt too stiff,
so I was planning to change the front wheel from
semi CX Sprint → full CX-RAY
and the rear wheel from
semi Compé → semi CX Sprint,
but since Gryphon Tack rims are
offset rims when tubeless,
but non-offset rims when tubular,
I went with semi CX Sprint for the front.
I'm planning to go with semi CX Sprint for the rear as well, not semi Compé.
I can already hear someone saying,
"Why not just build it a bit looser on purpose?"
But here's the thing with wheels:
the lower the tension gets,
the greater the left-right spoke tension variance
and the greater the scatter in spoke tension
across flanges on a single side become,
so I want to finish building with tension
just slightly below the rim's allowable limit,
leaving some slack for truing adjustments,
and if the wheel has dish,
I want to adjust stiffness by varying the amount
of asymmetric spoke builds on each side.
It's like how it's more reliable to always swing
a golf club at full power and vary distance by club selection
rather than trying to control distance by adjusting your swing
with a single club.
When I loosen all the nipples on a rear wheel that has
dish from the freewheel body—starting from the completed state
(where spoke length is roughly flush with the
outer edge of the nipple)—by about four turns,
you'll reliably see spokes that are noticeably loose
on the non-freewheel side, spokes that rattle when you
pinch them with your fingers and shake them.
A loosely built rear wheel tightened only two turns
from that point has a high probability of developing
looseness in the nipple of the lowest-tension spoke
observed before, and when spoke tension is completely lost,
the nipple can rotate over time and
drop inside the rim.
If someone insists on building a wheel that way,
they'd need to use tricks like increasing the strength
of thread-locking compound applied to the spoke threads.
With track wheels, Araya 16B Gold rims—which are
now the only option—have limits that are
(compared to recent rims) extremely low,
so you're forced to build loosely not by choice
but by necessity, and driven to employ such workarounds.
Built a front wheel with
Gryphon Tack's 30mm high tubular rim.
Revo disc hub, 24H, semi CX Sprint
64 reverse Italian lacing.
I'll do the spoke wrapping later.
With this customer's previously built wheels,
when I increased the spoke tension variance,
they said it felt too stiff,
so I was planning to change the front wheel from
semi CX Sprint → full CX-RAY
and the rear wheel from
semi Compé → semi CX Sprint,
but since Gryphon Tack rims are
offset rims when tubeless,
but non-offset rims when tubular,
I went with semi CX Sprint for the front.
I'm planning to go with semi CX Sprint for the rear as well, not semi Compé.
I can already hear someone saying,
"Why not just build it a bit looser on purpose?"
But here's the thing with wheels:
the lower the tension gets,
the greater the left-right spoke tension variance
and the greater the scatter in spoke tension
across flanges on a single side become,
so I want to finish building with tension
just slightly below the rim's allowable limit,
leaving some slack for truing adjustments,
and if the wheel has dish,
I want to adjust stiffness by varying the amount
of asymmetric spoke builds on each side.
It's like how it's more reliable to always swing
a golf club at full power and vary distance by club selection
rather than trying to control distance by adjusting your swing
with a single club.
When I loosen all the nipples on a rear wheel that has
dish from the freewheel body—starting from the completed state
(where spoke length is roughly flush with the
outer edge of the nipple)—by about four turns,
you'll reliably see spokes that are noticeably loose
on the non-freewheel side, spokes that rattle when you
pinch them with your fingers and shake them.
A loosely built rear wheel tightened only two turns
from that point has a high probability of developing
looseness in the nipple of the lowest-tension spoke
observed before, and when spoke tension is completely lost,
the nipple can rotate over time and
drop inside the rim.
If someone insists on building a wheel that way,
they'd need to use tricks like increasing the strength
of thread-locking compound applied to the spoke threads.
With track wheels, Araya 16B Gold rims—which are
now the only option—have limits that are
(compared to recent rims) extremely low,
so you're forced to build loosely not by choice
but by necessity, and driven to employ such workarounds.