Mavic Open Pro rims, Miche Primato track hubs (low flange front, high flange flip-flop rear), 32/32 DT Swiss Competition spokes, aluminium nipples. They’re niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.
I have that exact set up (but high flange on front too). Great wheelset, very pleased.
Awesome man. How long did it end up taking you to build them?
Ive got rims and hubs ready to build up for a non fixed project I have going. Cant wait.
Nice, understated and classic. The hegemony of the deep dish rim is over!
Probably took about 4 hours for the set, but I’d expect it to be quicker next time.
A few things I picked up:
- If you’re using grease, get a syringe (no needle) with a nozzle opening the same size as or slightly smaller than the spoke diameter at the threaded end. Use it to squeeze a small amount of grease into each nipple before assembly (rather than greasing the spoke threads). Then, each time you use a nipple, add a small amount of grease to the outside, around its shoulder. (If you’re using oil rather than grease, it’s probably easier to just dip the spoke threads in it and apply to to the rim holes with cotton swabs.)
- Jobst Brandt’s stress-relief method of determining proper tension didn’t work for me, perhaps because I was building 32 spoke wheels, rather than 36. My rims started to buckle due to over-tightening despite stress relieving and checking trueness each time I tightened.
- If you’re worried about spoke wind-up, get a marker and place a mark at the thread end of a few spokes, in line with the elbow. Use this mark to determine how much your spokes are winding up when you tighten them, and how much you need to overshoot and back off when tightening to remove wind-up. (E.g. To tighten a half turn, I would do a 3/4 turn, then back off 1/4.)
- Keeping your nipple flats aligned with the direction of the rim makes it easy to keep track of how much you’re tightening them. (E.g. A 1/2 turn starting with the spoke wrench pointing in the direction of the rim would end with it still pointing in the direction of the rim.)
- Use Jobst Brandt’s method for placing the valve hole in a wide spoke gap.
- It looks cool and is useful to have the sticker on the hub directly beneath the valve hole (as it makes locating the vale easier), but remember with crossed-spoke builds that when you insert a spoke through the hub next to the sticker and lace it to the spoke hole next to the valve, the sticker won’t be under the valve hole after you’ve twisted the hub to position the first set of spokes.
- If you’re using a frame rather than a truing stand, and your wheel sits more to one side than the other, it might be that your wheel’s dish is wrong, or it might be that the dropouts aren’t perfectly aligned (especially with horizontal dropouts). To tell if it’s a wheel problem, flip the wheel around and see whether it sits in the same or a different position. If different, it’s not dished properly.
Cheers for the tips Dave. Which Bike are you going to put them on?
Im looking forward to getting mine underway.
No problem. Originally got the parts to use on a Shogun road bike (circa 1990) conversion, but now might put them on a Fuji track frame for track use.