Wheelbuilding / Wheel Building / Wheel build help

Weinnman 4019 were on a wheelset we had here a few years back, seemed solid enough and took 28-38 tyres.

Exal LX17 £18 from SpaCycles, 575g. Very nice.

I'll look at these options. Cheers.

Do they both have stainless eyelets? I can't find that infornation.

I was looking at Rigida Sputniks but have just seen some photos of very rusty eyelets and they're a bit heavy.

There are some thoughts on Sputniks on page 20.

My thoughts...

They're very, very strong and unlikely to crack, are fantastically wide and stable (25mm width means your tyres hold loads of air). They're great for touring and travelling with and like most rims of this type are really easy to build. However they are heavier than normal road rims (good for training but add challenge in the hills) and I suspect that alloy is quite soft – though that's hard to be certain as my set are have taken a real thrashing in a water and sand. Even at this high rate of wear there is enough metal on those brake tracts to ride a continent!

One well documented downside to Sputniks is getting smaller tyres seated. I've had issues with 25 and 28mm tyres and so have many others. It's not the tyres, it's the shape of the rim. At home you can overinflate a bit and get tyres seated with a bash here and there but at the roadside that's isn't always an option and is always a PITA.

I'd take a look at Rigida Grizzlys which are also 25mm but don't have steel girders running through them. I've no idea if they suffer the same tyre-seating niggles.

Can anyone direct me to information on spoke tension and it's relation to rider weight?

I've had nothing but love for my sputniks on my tourer. Tyres a narrow-ish 35, no probs with bead seating.

Wheels should be built with maximum tension the rim can safely take, tension doesn't materially affect lateral stiffness and all spokes lose nearly all tension momentarily when over the contact patch of the tyre.

Spoke count is the variable you can tweak in response to rim strength and rider weight.

Possibly covering old territory here but I'm struggling to spec a new wheel set.
Use: Fixed – Mostly for everyday street riding. Needs a braking surface. Would prefer lower profile rather than deep aero rims and also low flange hubs – ideally.
My weight is around 69 or 70kg and I'm not a heavy rider i.e. I've not snapped a spoke or bent a wheel in normal riding.
So, with that in mind I'm considering DT RR440 rims, DT revolution spokes (I've used them in MTB wheel builds and like them)

Should I stick to a standard 32h 3 cross build or try for a 24 or 28h front, 32h rear. And hubs - what hubs? I'm not a tart brand wise - like function first, then form.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

^^ I see. So (assuming I'm well within what the rim can take) I shouldn't lower my tension for a lighter rider.

Thanks.

^ yes, that's what I've been led to believe from Jobst Brandt etc. The higher the spoke tension, the less likely it is that the spoke will lose enough tension over a bump for the nipple to unwind and the wheel to go out of true. The tighter the better, basically, as long as it's not pulling the rim out of true or damaging the rim around the spoke hole.

Cheers.

There are some thoughts on Sputniks on page 20.

Many thanks and for your thought as well.

Any ideas?

TB14s

^ yes, that's what I've been led to believe from Jobst Brandt etc. The higher the spoke tension, the less likely it is that the spoke will lose enough tension over a bump for the nipple to unwind and the wheel to go out of true. The tighter the better, basically, as long as it's not pulling the rim out of true or damaging the rim around the spoke hole.

The other I was led to believe is that the lower tension = less spoke breakage (especially on the touring bike with huge load).

Nope, spokes are more likely to break if they become unstressed (because the loads on them exceed the preload applied through the inherent spoke tension) than if they remain nice and taut. By the time you've got to the breaking point of the spoke by it being too tight, other parts of your wheel will have failed first.

The other I was led to believe is that the lower tension = less spoke breakage (especially on the touring bike with huge load).

Again, IIRC the Jobst Brandt Retrogrouch™ wisdom is that spoke breakages are almost always fatigue failures due to too many stress cycles. Spoke tension doesn't affect how many stress cycles the spoke undergoes or how many it can withstand before failing (I think). His recommendation is to keep tensioning the spokes until stress-relieving them puts the rim out of true, then backing them off a touch, re-truing, and stress relieving them again. If they stay true that time then they're good to go, basically. I don't think he made different recommendations for different wheel uses.

The good news is I'm far from stressing the rim/eyelets, at decent tension and the wheel feels incredibly stiff. All is good.

+1 for Sputniks being strong and durable. Had good feedback from heavier riders and from those carrying luggage.

Again, IIRC the Jobst Brandt Retrogrouch™ wisdom is that spoke breakages are almost always fatigue failures due to too many stress cycles. Spoke tension doesn't affect how many stress cycles the spoke undergoes or how many it can withstand before failing (I think). His recommendation is to keep tensioning the spokes until stress-relieving them puts the rim out of true, then backing them off a touch, re-truing, and stress relieving them again. If they stay true that time then they're good to go, basically. I don't think he made different recommendations for different wheel uses.

If you haven't tried this technique which is to ascertain the amount of tension a rim can handle, I would do it very carefully. What you're doing is going over what the rim can take and then backing off. But how far is safe so that you can see that you have indeed gone over? If you go too far you can ruin a good rim. It's happened to me a few times so I'm generally careful when the tension is reaching that point.

If you haven't tried this technique which is to ascertain the amount of tension a rim can handle, I would do it very carefully. What you're doing is going over what the rim can take and then backing off. But how far is safe so that you can see that you have indeed gone over? If you go too far you can ruin a good rim. It's happened to me a few times so I'm generally careful when the tension is reaching that point.

That's true, I actually don't tend to go that far. I've reached that point once or twice with Open Sports (I think they're relatively weak in that respect) but I have a Park tension meter so now I build up to a specific tension, based on what I know from experience the rim can take. About 110 kgf for Open Sports, up to 130 kgf for stiffer stuff like CXP33s.

Brandt's guide is very much of a time when spokes were a lot worse, rims were very shallow, etc., so you really had to maximise the tension and get them as even as possible to build a reliable wheel. I think there's probably a bit more leeway now as the parts are better. But the theory of "more tension is better as long as the rim can take it" still seems valid.

I use similar tensions to Regal, 110-125kgf depending on rim, higher tensions for rear drive-side and lower for non-drive-side, and higher tension on the front non-drive-side and lower for the front drive-side for disc brakes.

Gerd Schraner's book has a good section on spoke tension, near the beginning of 'The Craftsmanship' chapter.

He shows which sides of the wheel require what percentage of the overall tension, e.i. - rear wheel drive side will need a lot more tension than the non-drive side.

He lists a rough guide of spoke tensions, but again, as with Jobst Brandt, rims and spokes have changed a wee bit since publication, so I add a bit for modern stiffer rims, like a H plus Son Archetype for instance.

uhh, tension debate.
I have just realized that I have over tensioned a pair of wheels (stans arch 29er).
Max recommended is 90 kgf I have up to about 170kgf on front disc side. I was fooled by the flexibility of the thin dt revolutions.

can I just loosen to recommended tension and re true or is there anything else I have to be aware of?

So far they have held up fine to about a years worth of sporadic riding with no signs of damage..

170!? If they've held for over year at that and they're fine, why change anything?

park tm-1, you know.

170Kg on a 1.5mm diameter DT Rev is 1GPa stress, I expect the UTS is only about 1.5GPa. Are you sure they're really that tight or have you measured it wrongly?