Published by Tristan on 03 Jul 2008 at 04:48 pm
2 Years in the Life
This wheelset was the first I built with the Kinlin XR-300 rims. I built these for myself as a test of the quality of the rims to see if this was a product that I wanted to stock and sell to clients. I laced them to Formula sealed bearing hubs using light weight DT Swiss Revolution spokes and alloy nipples. Wheelset weight is a very respectable 1578 grams.
Their life has been a hard one:
Initially used on my road bike they performed very well. They were lent to many fellow cyclists for their feedback on ride quality and they logged a lot of abusive road kilometers under people specifically instructed to give them a hard time.
Happy with their performance on the road I fitted Stan’s rims strip and 34mm tyres and ran them on my cyclocross bike. I raced the 12h Cateye Moonride mountain bike event on this bike and wheels putting in consistent 21 and 22 minute laps. They’ve been through the Crazyman course a few times, done many gravel road adventures and suffered the abuse of being a daily commute wheelset. In short they’ve hard a hard life.
So how have they faired so far?
We’ll look at the rear wheel since that’s the one which bears most of the weight and abuse: Two years ago it had a lateral runout of +/-0.08mm (that’s 8 one hundredths of a millimeter!) and vertical runout of +/-0.06mm. Two years later they’ve never been trued and have a lateral runout of +/-0.22mm and vertical runout of +/-0.07mm. The front has the exact same runouts as when it was built. Considering that a lot of brand new ‘factory’ wheelsets come new out of the box with up to 2.0mm of runout I’d say this is pretty damn good!
So what can a wheel staying true be attributed to?
First: The components must be of quality and must suit the intended style of riding.
Second: The quality of the wheelbuild is incredibly important. By stress-releaving, eliminating spoke wind, balancing spoke tension and working to exacting standards and levels of detail I can ensure that the wheels I build are absolutely top quality. I have developed internal quality-control and tracking methods to store details of each wheelbuild in the unlikely event that a problem occurs and have developed custom packaging to ensure that wheels arrive safely at their couriered destination.
This level of detail and customization is why I can build wheelsets which outperform ‘factory’ wheelsets in almost every price point.
In the photos you can see the custom-made holder for the two Mitutoyo dial gauges mounted to my Park TS-1 truing stand to increase it’s accuracy as well as some of the custom developed tools I use to build with.
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Cédric Lemaître on 07 Nov 2009 at 12:07 am #
Hi,
Congratulations for this nice work and report.
You speak about the variation of the lateral and vertical truthness but never of the spoke tension tolerance?
How many was the initial tension tolerance (10%, 15%)?
Thank for reply.
Best,
Cédric
Tristan on 09 Nov 2009 at 10:03 am #
Hi Cédric
I use a Park TM-1 which is as repeatable as any other tension gauge on the market – mine is calibrated using a special jig and loadcell (http://wheelworks.co.nz/blog/spoke-tension-meter-calibration/) so it is very accurate.
I aim for a ~5% variance (measured from the gauge of which is generally one unit on the Park gauge. The problem is that small differences in diameter of the spoke will make a reasonably large effect on what the gauge reads…so the reading you get isn’t exactly true. There isn’t much you can do about this though without spending hours measuring each spoke along it’s length with a micrometer.
10% variance would be fine, however 15% is a bit excessive….it’s quite easy to get inside 15%
Cheers, Tristan
Cédric Lemaître on 10 Nov 2009 at 10:22 am #
Thanks Tristan for reply.
Best,
Cédric