Goldtec Hub Failure

For people, who are interested, I emailed Rob Torres about the lacing and he sent me this back:

You did build it right. You can cross the spokes any way your prefer really, the only exception will be if they interfere with the rear derailleur on multi-speed rear wheels, but that isn't a consideration in your case.

I'm sorry that you had this happen, but things do go wrong at times. From what I can tell from your photo is looks like the hub wasn't strong enough to take the stresses from the radial spoke(s) in the area where the failure occurred. This can happen because of a low-quality hub made with poor quality metal, the design of the hub, a flaw in the casting that was internal to the section and couldn't be seen, or a combination of all of those.

Several companies that make hubs warn not to lace them radially because of potential problems like what happened to you, even Campy warns not to lace their hubs radially for this reason and they use the best metals and have strong designs. And I did have an older Campy hub have a 'pull out' as this is commonly called (probably partly because the hub had been built many times with various lacing's before I settled on the half Crow's Foot lacing, all those lacing's had stressed the hub flange many ways). But with my present rear wheels that I have Crow's Foot laces, a Campy for my road and Shimano for my mountain, they have done fine.

It could have been a manufaturing defect that causes what happened to you since the hub's makers say the design is strong enough for that type of lacing, an air bubble or an impurity in the metal what was hidden by good metal would have caused something like this and not been detectable through normal quality inspections.

While you can lace a pattern like the Crow's Foot, or any pattern really, with spokes alternating or not, there usually isn't any absolute reason why you have to one way or the other. If you had alternated the lacing it would not have prevented what happened.