Mickie's Front Wheel

Currently building up a set for my friend Mickie. This will be her do-everything wheelset. Criteria: light, durable, comfortable and pretty. We chose navy blue Chris King R45 hubs in 24 and 28 drillings, with 2x Sapim Race spokes, 12mm brass nipples, and Pacenti SL23 rims.

The set is half way complete. This morning I finished the front, which I find more challenging than the rear.

The workspace: stand, Spotify, coffee mug, and spoke ruler. The pieces of tape on the stand are used to mark the rim in quarter sections, which aids in spoke tensioning.

One of the best.

Vital equipment: spoke tensiometer, spoke wrench, and tension chart. Wheel building is like a basketball game: the final minutes of the game can occupy a third of your time. This wheel didn't foul. Thankfully.

Pacenti rear Dura Ace 9000 wheel is done!

I managed to stretch this project out over 10 days. Test ride this afternoon. This wheel goes on my better half's pit bike. The DA hub is nice, but for the money, White Industries and Chris Kings are better. The verdict is still out on the rim. I've been riding the front Pacenti/DA wheel for 3 weeks. There was some initial pulsing when braking, but that seems to be going away.

The weight of the set should be around 1500 grams. Not bad for about $600 invested.

I can build wheels cheaper and lighter, but not better. These hubs should last 5 years of racing or 10 years of riding.

Ride report to follow....

Pacenti SL23 first impressions

Updated August 18

My new Dura Ace 9000 hubs arrived last week after what seemed like an eternity. The hubs, which are in 24/28 hole drilling, are pleasing to look at and are respectably light. Like anything with the Dura Ace name they'll last forever. The 7800 hubs Mateo raced on for three season still had intact grease and seals. Wizardry.

What the Dura Ace hubs are not is a good value. At the moment they are priced similarly to Chris King R45s and way out front of White Industries. Those are all equally good options, and will all be in service 5-10 years from now.

For this build I used the Pacenti SL23 rim. This was my first build on the rim and my impression is very good. The height of the brake track appears to be fairly generous. The rim is slightly taller and rounder than the comparable HED Belgium C2. The finish is flawless. And there were no metal burrs remaining in the rim from production. Most importantly: the rim is approximately 1mm wider than the HED, Velocity A23, or the H Plus Son Archetype. Added bonus: it is lighter than all those other options.

So how does it ride? Very nicely. The rim has a pleasing lateral stiffness, especially when combined with the 2x lacing.

Only potential downside: when I was truing the wheel I watched the stand's feeler gauge take off a sliver of metal from the brake track. Not sure if this happens with other rims, or whether this is a softer alloy. Kinda freaked me out.

Update: this is a great rim and unless the HED Belgian Plus (~$150 and non existent) knocks my socks off, this rim ($98 and available everywhere in multiple drillings) will be my go-to for future builds.

• The brake pulsing I experienced seems to happen only with long v-brake cartridges. Braking with standard road pads is smooth.
• There's no problem with pitting on the braking surface. I examined my pads after 500 miles of racing and city riding and there's no more embedded metal than one would expect. In fact, there was almost none.
• The only caution when building on these rims seems to be a tendency for the nipples to bind/stick during tensioning. These require more spoke alignment and stress relief than other rims. Again, I recommend these rims without reservation. They're the best combination of weight, value, and quality.

Spring Cleaning

I have always found that the best time to clean is when there's something else you should be doing, but don't want to. Like income tax returns. Compared to doing those, cleaning out the stash of bike parts is a joy.

I needed to dispose of two aluminum rims and a carbon fork. This task was made less desirable by the fact that I didn't simply want to leave these items on the curb--they were structurally unsound--so modifications were required.

The first to fall victim to the hacksaw blade was a 2006 Cannondale Premium+ full carbon fork. This fork was top-of-the-line back in its day, even featuring carbon dropouts. It was and still is ridiculously light. The problem is it was mounted to a bike that hit the back end of a Buick at 20 mph. Carbon is tough, but carbon also cracks. I didn't want some hipster douche salvaging this fork so I sawed it at the crown.

Wow. New respect for Cannondale carbon forks!

By comparison, here's the top of the steerer tube.

Next to fall victim to the hacksaw: a DT Swiss RR 1.1 rim. This rim is the Swiss interpretation of the venerable Mavic Open Pro rim. I believe the Swiss version is lighter and cheaper. Anyway, the rim in question was part of the rear wheel on my track bike. I just rebuilt the wheel when it took a 2" roofing nail in the tire. The nail punctured the rim bridge and then exited the rim's sidewall. The damage was impressive. I also rode it for another 12 months before replacing it with an H Plus Son Archetype.

Here's the DT Swiss next to a HED Ardennes rim.

The final victim was the most painful for me: a 24 hole HED Ardennes Scandium rim. HED rims are sold to the public under the name Belgian. These are regular 6000 series aluminum. HED saves the good and expensive stuff for their pre-built wheels. This rim was a Scandium version, which like the Higgs-Boson particle and unicorns, was just too good to be true. And it was, because I ended up destroying the rim during wheel building. Lesson: Scandium is lighter than 6000 series aluminum, but not necessarily as strong.

I cut apart both rims and here's the result.

The HED (left) is significantly wider. The DT Swiss rim (right) is significantly overbuilt.

Coming up: Pancetti SL23 rims laced to Dura Ace 9000 24/28 hole hubs. Hotness!

Carbon Toe-in

If I'm going to Hell, my punishment will be listening to improperly maintained, noisy bikes for eternity. Breaking in this carbon wheelset was a scared-straight visit to Hell: no matter what I did, I couldn't silence the squealing brakes. I sanded the brake pads (they build up a glaze), I meticulously cleaned the brake track with alcohol and acetone, and I even tried riding the brakes thinking it was only a matter of breaking-in the new rim's brake track. Nothing. The brakes were screeching loud enough to make neighborhood dogs howl. I concluded: this is the difference between a $200 Chinese carbon rim and a $800 Enve or Zipp rim.

As I was about to throw down some mad cash on different brake pads--a last attempt before writing off the wheelset--I researched the squealing carbon rim problem. There are three prevailing opinions: 1) it's a problem with cheaper rims; 2) it's  problem with certain rim/pad combinations; and 3) it's a problem related to improper pad toe-in. I had assumed #1 and #2, but hadn't considered #3.

So I toed in my yellow Swiss Stop pads on my road bike. Now my braking is quiet.

Who knew? From cross racing I was familiar with the cursed cantilever tendencies to howl unless toed-in. I never thought the same technique would work for a road bike with carbon rims. Lesson learned.

Only the finest brake pads that 60 bucks can buy.

That's some aggressive toe-in, son.

Carbon rims!

Question: Why does it cost 90 bucks to ship these things from China?
Answer: Because Vivian puts them on an airplane so they get here in 8 days.

My order of carbon rims has arrived:

• 1 set of 20/24 hole 50mm carbon tubulars
• 1 set of 20/24 hole 50mm carbon clinchers

I measured the ERD of the clinchers last night and they were within 1mm of factory claims. I've seen more variation on aluminum rims, FYI.

This batch of rims looks a little higher quality than the ones I ordered a year ago. Those were a unidirectional finish, and had the unlikely claim of being able to tolerate 250 Kgf spoke tension. Something may have been lost in translation.

This new batch is matte finish 3k carbon weave and carries a more realistic claim of 180 Kgf spoke tension before failure. This set is also lighter than the originals. The claim of 400 grams seems conservative.

I have ordered the spokes for the carbon clinchers/Chris King setup. That'll get laced and built this weekend. I hope.

Something to look at until those are together....

A harder, higher friction treatment for the brake track. Braking during cross season was sufficient. Not sure I'd bomb an Alpine descent on them.

The rentless pursuit of even spoke tension

Last night I finished off the dynamo wheel I have been building for my dad since his last birthday in August 2012. This wheel, like most I build, has a unique story. The rims (Velocity A23, 36 hole) were originally procured for a friend who was attempting her own build. Once she realized 26 inchers were needed, the 700c Velocity rims reverted to me. Building a super sweet dynamo wheel for my dad seemed like a great birthday present.

Several month, and several other wheel builds later, I am in the home stretch for this project. As I was in no particular hurry to finish this one, I decided to get it as technically perfect as I could. So I:

• Constructed my own spoke tension map. The Park Tool one doesn't work with my new tensiometer.
• Soaked the brass nipples overnight in Triflow. The point of doing this is to minimize the potential for spoke wind-up due to friction on the spoke threads, and friction between the nipple's shoulder and the rim.
• Used my new Wheel Fanatyk tensiometer. It was much easier to use than my old Park Tool tensiometer and much more accurate.

The result.

Red graph line indicates the right side spokes; blue is left; and gray is the average of both sides. This wheel is straight and true.

No too shabby. The average spoke tension varies +/- 1.5%. This 36 spoke wheel should last a lifetime even under my 200+ lb dad.

Now I can move onto other more exotic, low spoke count projects!