A customer brought in a front wheel from a Racing Zero Night (high-end wheelset) for repair.
They wanted me to fix some runout in the wheel.
Sure enough, there was one noticeable lateral runout.
The wheel's overall condition was good,
with hardly any wear marks on the brake zone.
The hub rotated smoothly and had good feel to it.
The orange on the WARNING sticker had faded,
which suggests the wheel spent a long time
on display or in storage after being taken out of its wheel bag.
Totally beside the point,
but there were traces of a Vittoria butyl tube
having been used in it before.
↑That thing
I loosened the nipple at the spot with the big runout
until the spoke tension was gone.
I suspected the spoke might be bent—
actually, the amount of runout was so severe it couldn't exist without spoke damage.
But the spoke turned out to be perfectly straight.
I fixed the lateral runout at that spot first,
but what caught my attention at that point was the radial runout.
Out of the 16 rim holes, about 5 holes in a row
had the rim running out toward the outer edge.
However, there were no traces of the nipples being tampered with after shipping,
so this is extremely unusual for Fulcrum—
it might just be a quality control outlier from the factory.
Since there was such bad lateral runout initially,
I didn't check centering at that stage.
Only after I'd corrected both the lateral and radial runout
did I use the center gauge for the first time—
and as you can see in the images above, it was dead center.
From there I went on to eliminate any fine lateral runout,
but when I checked with the center gauge afterward,
the result was the same, so I didn't bother taking more photos.
They wanted me to fix some runout in the wheel.
Sure enough, there was one noticeable lateral runout.
The wheel's overall condition was good,
with hardly any wear marks on the brake zone.
The hub rotated smoothly and had good feel to it.
The orange on the WARNING sticker had faded,
which suggests the wheel spent a long time
on display or in storage after being taken out of its wheel bag.
Totally beside the point,
but there were traces of a Vittoria butyl tube
having been used in it before.
↑That thing
I loosened the nipple at the spot with the big runout
until the spoke tension was gone.
I suspected the spoke might be bent—
actually, the amount of runout was so severe it couldn't exist without spoke damage.
But the spoke turned out to be perfectly straight.
I fixed the lateral runout at that spot first,
but what caught my attention at that point was the radial runout.
Out of the 16 rim holes, about 5 holes in a row
had the rim running out toward the outer edge.
However, there were no traces of the nipples being tampered with after shipping,
so this is extremely unusual for Fulcrum—
it might just be a quality control outlier from the factory.
Since there was such bad lateral runout initially,
I didn't check centering at that stage.
Only after I'd corrected both the lateral and radial runout
did I use the center gauge for the first time—
and as you can see in the images above, it was dead center.
From there I went on to eliminate any fine lateral runout,
but when I checked with the center gauge afterward,
the result was the same, so I didn't bother taking more photos.