A customer brought in a Spinergy Zero Light rear wheel for service.
There's one spot with a pretty significant wobble, and the customer wants it repaired.
The spoke tension was completely lost on the spoke directly underneath the wobble.
The Zylon spokes on the Zero Light have quite a long thread length,
giving good redundancy relative to spoke length.
As expected, the front wheel with radial lacing and the rear wheel with tangential lacing
use different spoke lengths, but the left and right sides of the rear wheel
use identical spoke lengths.
↑These are both the ends of the anti-freewheel side spokes, and
the relationship between spoke and nipple end face
when radial runout has been dialed out
shows more variation than with steel spokes.
↑This is the nipple from the spot that lost tension.
This isn't recessed within normal variation—
it's simply loose.
This rim hole happens to be next to the valve hole,
and the red rubber bits scattered around are
likely evidence that this wheel previously had
Michelin tires with red sidewalls.
The image above shows the valve hole.
↑The rim in the image is rotating.
By retightening the loose nipple and making fine adjustments
to three or four other minor runout spots,
I was able to eliminate the lateral runout.
At that point, radial runout was virtually gone—
the only thing the truing stand gauge barely touched was
the rim seam, achieving the limit of precision for this rim.
So with no lateral or radial runout,
the rim was significantly offset to the right.
When mounted on the frame, this would be
visibly apparent from the clearance difference between it and the chainstays.
The Zylon spokes have a thread pitch that isn't particularly coarse,
but the anti-freewheel side tightened very smoothly,
so I happily continued tensioning
only to have the wheel center flip to the other side.
The freewheel side seemed tight from the start, so
I recentralized the wheel by backing off slightly on the over-tightened
anti-freewheel side.
Even so, it's noticeably more tensioned than the original state.
What surprised me about this wheel is
that it was shipped from the Kanto region for just this amount of work.
I wonder if there's no shop nearby.It's Tokyo, though.
Since this is a wheel that can't even be trued without specialized tools,
that might be the reason they refused the job.
On another note, there was a customer who bought the same Zero Light model
from Sylvest Cycle back in the day and tried to get it trued there,
only to have the shop refuse—saying "we can't buy tools just for one job"
or some such excuse. So I told them,
"Fine, I'll buy the tools here myself, lend them to you, and you do the truing,"
and they botched it so badly that when the wheel came back, it had
severe radial runout—actually pulsing as it rotated without even being on the stand—
and the wheel was destroyed (repair costs several thousand yen).
So we ended up covering it at our shop.
(→See here)
Actually, not having specialized tools means
they don't do pre-sale inspections either.
Seriously, drop dead, you incompetent morons.
There's one spot with a pretty significant wobble, and the customer wants it repaired.
The spoke tension was completely lost on the spoke directly underneath the wobble.
The Zylon spokes on the Zero Light have quite a long thread length,
giving good redundancy relative to spoke length.
As expected, the front wheel with radial lacing and the rear wheel with tangential lacing
use different spoke lengths, but the left and right sides of the rear wheel
use identical spoke lengths.
↑These are both the ends of the anti-freewheel side spokes, and
the relationship between spoke and nipple end face
when radial runout has been dialed out
shows more variation than with steel spokes.
↑This is the nipple from the spot that lost tension.
This isn't recessed within normal variation—
it's simply loose.
This rim hole happens to be next to the valve hole,
and the red rubber bits scattered around are
likely evidence that this wheel previously had
Michelin tires with red sidewalls.
The image above shows the valve hole.
↑The rim in the image is rotating.
By retightening the loose nipple and making fine adjustments
to three or four other minor runout spots,
I was able to eliminate the lateral runout.
At that point, radial runout was virtually gone—
the only thing the truing stand gauge barely touched was
the rim seam, achieving the limit of precision for this rim.
So with no lateral or radial runout,
the rim was significantly offset to the right.
When mounted on the frame, this would be
visibly apparent from the clearance difference between it and the chainstays.
The Zylon spokes have a thread pitch that isn't particularly coarse,
but the anti-freewheel side tightened very smoothly,
so I happily continued tensioning
only to have the wheel center flip to the other side.
The freewheel side seemed tight from the start, so
I recentralized the wheel by backing off slightly on the over-tightened
anti-freewheel side.
Even so, it's noticeably more tensioned than the original state.
What surprised me about this wheel is
that it was shipped from the Kanto region for just this amount of work.
I wonder if there's no shop nearby.
Since this is a wheel that can't even be trued without specialized tools,
that might be the reason they refused the job.
On another note, there was a customer who bought the same Zero Light model
from Sylvest Cycle back in the day and tried to get it trued there,
only to have the shop refuse—saying "we can't buy tools just for one job"
or some such excuse. So I told them,
"Fine, I'll buy the tools here myself, lend them to you, and you do the truing,"
and they botched it so badly that when the wheel came back, it had
severe radial runout—actually pulsing as it rotated without even being on the stand—
and the wheel was destroyed (repair costs several thousand yen).
So we ended up covering it at our shop.
(→See here)
Actually, not having specialized tools means
they don't do pre-sale inspections either.