Rider Profile
Name : Lydia
Origin : Germany
Information : Female, Height 1,70m, age unknown. Fell in love with drop bars. Love my road and gravel bike, but also my mountain bike. My mileage is ~12,000km/year. Riding for fun, but also won some podium places in local comps.
Specifications
Bike
Frameset : Canyon WMN Endurace CF SL Disc
Paint theme : Limited Rapha Women's 100
Groupset : Complete Shimano Ultegra Di2 2x11
Wheels
Rims : Light Bicycle Falcon AR28 Disc flyweight
Hubs : Goldix 21H 2:1 Centerlock Hubs with 36T Ratchet
Spokes : Sapim CX Ray
Nipples : Sapim Polyax purple
Tires : Continental GP5000 25mm tube type with TPU tubes
The story starts from a hunt for 21 spoked builds.
This is a story about glitches, about learning and about lightweight wheels of course. How did the story start? I often wondered why I must go with 24 spokes, which are more or less standard for road bikes. Me, as a total flyweight and rather low power output .. but since I never found disc hubs with less than 24 spoke holes, there was no choice.
In the springtime, I accidentally found some interesting lightweight hubs: disc brake, 21 holes. 21? Wasn't this what I was looking for? And the 21 spokes came with a feature: 2:1 lacing. I was curious and at the same time a bit concerned: could this work?
And then magic happened – also known as really good algorithms for online advertising – I got advertisements from different carbon wheel companies for 21H disc wheelsets, so 21 spokes seemed to work. Now I only needed a good reason to get these hubs: I had one bike left over with aluminum wheels - my Canyon Endurace which was still rolling on aluminum wheels. Quite good ones, but still not carbon.
Before ordering I read quite a bit about the company behind these hubs – I found good and some bad reviews, but overall more good ones. Bearings might not be good, but they can be changed. The ratchet may fail for riders with high power, which is not my category, so I bought them. When I received them, I put some old spokes into the flange to see the pattern. Despite the usual 2x pattern for 24H hubs, the 14 spokes side revealed a 3x pattern. After overthinking that, the surprise was not really one. 28H straight pull hubs with 14 spokes on each side do come with a 3x lacing.
Now it was time to check out the available rims at Light Bicycle.
2:1 lacing is more shooting for a symmetric rim, but somehow no symmetric rim really had all the wanted features and finally I ended up again at the AR28, which is slightly asymmetric. I got in touch with Edwin and we exchanged some emails. He confirmed that the AR28 is not 100% perfect, but it would be fine. There would be slightly more tension on the radial spokes than on the crossed, but the spoke tensions would be much more even than for a 1:1 lacing. So I took the decision to take the AR28 again – as a flyweight version, no access holes in the rim center channel, satin finish UD and water drainage holes. No fancy extra design this time to save the weight this time. And of course 21H with 2:1 drilling. And the cherry on top – Edwin's idea – is the holographic pattern on the rims.
Only a couple of weeks later I already had the rims in my hand, even before summer vacation, so I could be fast and build them before vacation. When I checked the spoke drilling directions I got a headache. I must have made a mistake in my head, and it was pretty late. On the rear the 7 radial spokes were pointing to the drive side and 14 to the disc. On the front it was similar: 7 radial spokes to the disc and 14 crossed on the right side. It should be the other way around! Tired and puzzled, I went to bed.
The next day I asked some friends if they could double-check and try to find where I made the mistake but we didn't find any user error. The rim drilling must have an issue. I contacted Edwin again, and he asked for photos and a short video to double-check internally. Shortly later he confirmed that there must have been a wrong drilling – I would get new rims as fast as possible. Why am I saying this? Mistakes do happen sometimes, and I also will do some in the following parts of the story. Yet the way how Light Bicycle reacted – no big discussions, sending out new rims super fast, is outstanding.
My next headache is that the spoke calculation tools I use do not provide the 2:1 lacing with straightpull hubs.
What else happened this week? I had summer vacation doing a bike packing trip in Norway with my gravel bike – my AR36 wheels are still super tough working horses. They’ve run roughly 10,000km now, and if you wonder about the AR28 with the braided UD pattern? They are also in good shape. Last year and this year they were good fellows in some races and I got some podium places. :-)
Back to the main story: Coming back from summer holiday, physically crashed, mentally refreshed, I wanted to calculate the spoke lengths. It turned out that all tools that I usually use do not provide the 2:1 lacing in case of straight pull hubs. That was something I didn't expect. I did a lot of online research, read a lot and at the end I was pretty convinced to do the right calculation with a little bit of workaround to work with my tools and ordered spokes.
When I put the rims, hubs and spokes together, I realized quickly that the spokes on the crossed side were too long. It was like 4mm off. What exactly did I do wrong in the calculation? The hub dimensions were fine, and the measurements were in agreement with the very detailed technical drawing. I was really confused, not knowing why I was so unsatisfied. And then I just stared unhappily at the wheels... and stared .. and stared.. and then something crossed my mind: the flange hole positions were different from the assumptions in the tool! I went through all the calculations in the tool again and also did trigonometric calculations on my own without any tool and the result was 4mm shorter spokes.
So new spokes were needed, and when I ordered them I made a quick decision and purchased purple nipples. I wasn't sure if purple would fit the bike, but I wanted to give the wheels a little bit of color. When the second order arrived I tried purple and blue nipples, also mixing them and ended up with pure purple. Also, the spoke lengths turned out to be correct and I quickly finished the build with some fresh motivation! 2:1 for the truing procedure took a bit more brain capacity than 1:1 but at some point it got more and more easy.
Now let's come to the final glitch.
When I tested the spoke hole directions, I just put wooden sticks into the drilled holes to check the drilling angle. A little chip from the wooden stick must have dropped into one rim. It was rattling like hell during the complete truing and it didn't come out of the valve hole on its own. Nightmare!
How to remove a wooden splint from a rim without boring a hole (besides valve of course)? Shaking it out of the valve hole was not working. After I tried that desperately for a while I wrapped some scotch tape inside out to a spoke, inserted that to the valve hole and hoped to catch it with the adhesive. And it worked! Finally the wheels were finished with a weight of 1170g. Pretty awesome. I just had to install the cassette, disc rotors and tires, which went without any further glitches.
Of course after that I weighed the complete bike: 7.2kg with bottle cages, Garmin mount (but no Garmin) and pedals. For this frame a quite good result!
And the riding? The bike is much more vivid and reasonably lighter. I used them roughly 400-500 km and I know people say it is just a mental thing and you won't be faster with light wheels. But I must admit, a pound less wheel weight does make me faster, especially as a climbing goat!
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