Today it's wheels again (and so on).
I received a rear wheel from a customer's Mechnico (メカニコ) complete wheel build.
The spokes are Sapim CX-RAY on both sides
Unlabeled straight-spoke hub, 24H
Both sides are laced in forced 2-cross pattern.
↑This is the final crossing on the non-freewheel side, but
When you squeeze it, it's pretty loose.
It's a straight-spoke hub, but
the final crossing is laced on both sides.
↑There's wear marks too.
The customer's request is to change this rear wheel
to semi-CX Sprint spokes
and have it trued.
This is a request from me to the customer:
It was built with Sapim 14mm aluminum nipples,
and I asked if we could change them to
DT 12mm aluminum nipples.
From the start, I don't use the 14mm aluminum nipples
that come with CX-RAY spokes—
I build wheels with DT 12mm aluminum nipples instead.
Aside from what wheel manufacturers do,
I secretly think all the hand-builders out there
who don't realize what's wrong with Sapim nipples are idiots.
If anyone can explain to me what's so good about Sapim nipples,
please do tell me.
On the other hand, if someone asks me what's good about
DT nipples, well, that's proprietary information,
so I can't say—haha (wait, why are you laughing?).
These days CX-RAY doesn't come with nipples,
so you should be able to use whatever you want separately,
but I still can't wrap my head around hand-builders
who are using Sapim nipples.
With this particular wheel, whether it was intentional or not,
deep nipple pockets hid the fact
that the spoke length was short.
I'm replacing all the nipples, but
since the rim has no holes except the valve hole on the outer edge,
the replacement is extremely tedious.
There's a barely defensible amount of center offset that probably happened over time,
but even if I true it
just by tightening the non-freewheel side,
the looseness doesn't obviously
improve to the eye.
Even if this rear wheel was perfectly centered when new,
it would have been loose back then too.
Both hub and rim were dirty, so
I cleaned them.
It's built.
I changed the freewheel-side spokes to CX Sprint.
I'll do the truing later.
↑It's centered, and look how clean the hub is now!
As I mentioned earlier,
I've replaced the nipples with DT 12mm aluminum nipples.
I received a rear wheel from a customer's Mechnico (メカニコ) complete wheel build.
The spokes are Sapim CX-RAY on both sides
Unlabeled straight-spoke hub, 24H
Both sides are laced in forced 2-cross pattern.
↑This is the final crossing on the non-freewheel side, but
When you squeeze it, it's pretty loose.
It's a straight-spoke hub, but
the final crossing is laced on both sides.
↑There's wear marks too.
The customer's request is to change this rear wheel
to semi-CX Sprint spokes
and have it trued.
This is a request from me to the customer:
It was built with Sapim 14mm aluminum nipples,
and I asked if we could change them to
DT 12mm aluminum nipples.
From the start, I don't use the 14mm aluminum nipples
that come with CX-RAY spokes—
I build wheels with DT 12mm aluminum nipples instead.
Aside from what wheel manufacturers do,
I secretly think all the hand-builders out there
who don't realize what's wrong with Sapim nipples are idiots.
If anyone can explain to me what's so good about Sapim nipples,
please do tell me.
On the other hand, if someone asks me what's good about
DT nipples, well, that's proprietary information,
so I can't say—haha (wait, why are you laughing?).
These days CX-RAY doesn't come with nipples,
so you should be able to use whatever you want separately,
but I still can't wrap my head around hand-builders
who are using Sapim nipples.
With this particular wheel, whether it was intentional or not,
deep nipple pockets hid the fact
that the spoke length was short.
I'm replacing all the nipples, but
since the rim has no holes except the valve hole on the outer edge,
the replacement is extremely tedious.
There's a barely defensible amount of center offset that probably happened over time,
but even if I true it
just by tightening the non-freewheel side,
the looseness doesn't obviously
improve to the eye.
Even if this rear wheel was perfectly centered when new,
it would have been loose back then too.
Both hub and rim were dirty, so
I cleaned them.
It's built.
I changed the freewheel-side spokes to CX Sprint.
I'll do the truing later.
↑It's centered, and look how clean the hub is now!
As I mentioned earlier,
I've replaced the nipples with DT 12mm aluminum nipples.