Craig is the proud owner of a set of Zelvy carbon hoops on Project321 hubs, that we built up for him last year. He’s picked up another new bike, and asked us to help build some new carbon wheels.
Of course the Zelvy rim choice made sense – smart engineering, local 5 year warranty and competitive pricing. This time, Craig wanted to try something different for the hubs. Very happy with his Project321 hubs, he decided to try the new 48 point engagement titanium freehub on the White Industries XMR hubset.
We custom cut the DT Swiss Competition spokes, taking into account the DT Swiss nipples used, lacing pattern and spoke stretch (at tension). This ensures 100% thread engagement in the completed wheel. In order to do so, we calculate spoke length to 0.1mm, and custom cut to a similar tolerance.
Many “wheelbuilders” will just select from what spokes are on hand (usually supplied in incremental 2mm lengths), meaning they may be not quite the right length, or even too short! We’ve even seen wheels built with bizarre lacing choices, so that a builder could use the spokes they had in stock, rather than order the right length (or ideally, use a spoke cutting and threading machine to get it right). This is quite common with the cheap Chinese carbon wheelsets, and a key contributor to unreliability.
At XLR8 we pride ourselves in doing it right. No bullsh!t. No shortcuts.
It takes time, but you’re worth it!