I received a Ksyrium (Mavic disc brake wheel) from a customer.
This is a Ksyrium from back when Mavic
was using Zicral aluminum spokes.
The customer mentioned that both wheels
seemed to have loose spoke tension,
and... yeah, they definitely were loose.
When I squeezed the spokes, they deflected quite a bit.
It's not like spoke tension should just be
cranked as tight as possible,
but these were definitely too loose.
I decided to tension them to roughly the limit
of what you'd see in a batch of wheels fresh from the distributor—
like maybe 3 out of 100 might be this tight,
that kind of level.
Starting with the front wheel.
The rim is shifted to the right side.
There's also some runout.
Since I'm going to fix it anyway, the centering issue is actually helpful.
While correcting runout, I shifted the rim to the left side
by tightening one side preferentially.
The amount of shift was even larger,
meaning I tightened the nipples enough to move the rim
by the original right shift amount plus the current left shift amount.
At this point I've mostly eliminated the lateral runout,
so when I first checked centering, the exact amount of offset
I observed might have varied slightly depending on where
I placed the centering gauge, but now it reads the same result
no matter where I check.
From there, I shifted the rim to the right by further tightening
to get it centered.
There are no untightened nipples,
and the lateral movement of the rim I made was substantial.
Next, the rear wheel.
Yep, the classic left-side offset.
While correcting runout, I shifted the rim to the right side.
Then adjusted it again by pulling the rim back to the left side
with a bias-tightening approach.
Since I was doing this work right in front of the customer,
I didn't really need to go through the step of tightening one side at a time.
But for the sake of the blog content, I shot photos of the rim
going back and forth as I did the preferential tightening.
These days, I often don't end up writing about work like this—
I don't bother taking the progress photos in the first place.
This is a Ksyrium from back when Mavic
was using Zicral aluminum spokes.
The customer mentioned that both wheels
seemed to have loose spoke tension,
and... yeah, they definitely were loose.
When I squeezed the spokes, they deflected quite a bit.
It's not like spoke tension should just be
cranked as tight as possible,
but these were definitely too loose.
I decided to tension them to roughly the limit
of what you'd see in a batch of wheels fresh from the distributor—
like maybe 3 out of 100 might be this tight,
that kind of level.
Starting with the front wheel.
The rim is shifted to the right side.
There's also some runout.
Since I'm going to fix it anyway, the centering issue is actually helpful.
While correcting runout, I shifted the rim to the left side
by tightening one side preferentially.
The amount of shift was even larger,
meaning I tightened the nipples enough to move the rim
by the original right shift amount plus the current left shift amount.
At this point I've mostly eliminated the lateral runout,
so when I first checked centering, the exact amount of offset
I observed might have varied slightly depending on where
I placed the centering gauge, but now it reads the same result
no matter where I check.
From there, I shifted the rim to the right by further tightening
to get it centered.
There are no untightened nipples,
and the lateral movement of the rim I made was substantial.
Next, the rear wheel.
Yep, the classic left-side offset.
While correcting runout, I shifted the rim to the right side.
Then adjusted it again by pulling the rim back to the left side
with a bias-tightening approach.
Since I was doing this work right in front of the customer,
I didn't really need to go through the step of tightening one side at a time.
But for the sake of the blog content, I shot photos of the rim
going back and forth as I did the preferential tightening.
These days, I often don't end up writing about work like this—
I don't bother taking the progress photos in the first place.