Got home after this morning’s 16miler, second time on my nice shiny new wheels. Thought they weren’t feeling right and assumed I’d put a buckle in them and they need a quick re-true.

When I looked at the rear wheel I could wiggle virtually ever spoke over a cm, the entire wheel had lost tension. I think I’m lucky it hadn#t completely colapsed.

I have never had this with any other wheelset over the years, sometimes had to do a quick true / re-tension but not to this extent.

Is this down to crap wheelbuilding or a bit of bad lucK?

Definitely the build I would have thought, ‘a bit of bad luck’ would be wacking it off a rock and maybe loosening a spoke or two if you flat spotted the rim.

Lighter more flexible rims will give the spokes a greater opportunity to loosen, but ultimately a good build should prevent it.

I’d exepect lots of loosening from an ‘off the shelf’ wheelset, were they sold as ‘hand built’?

They were sold as hand built by a company that has a pretty poor reputation on here (think octopus)

I’ve spent an hour or so re-trueing and think they are almost back to true, about 1mm either side bit more up/down play than I would like.

Had a few Hope factory wheelsets and they’ve needed a quick tweak, this wheel need a complete retension. It was so bad I thought it was going to need a full rebuild.

Will take it for a ride tomorrow to see if I can detect any flat spots. Might be putting in a complaint though I fully expect to be told to piss off. Pays your money…

I made a bit of a mess of a stock set of WTB wheels on an off the shelf bike, loose spokes, flat spotted rims etc, they were perfectly salvageable though, just trued and tensioned and checked all the other spokes, worst case is your new wheels might have a 1mm wobble in them after two rides.

Yeah, crap (not just a bit crap, but VERY CRAP) wheel building. Nothing else to it in a short distance like that. A decently built wheel will not need touching at all for a long time….

Poor wheelbuild. They must have been loose to start and that allows them to loosen further. I’ve built hundreds of wheels and never had that happen. Bring out the fruit blender!

And fwiw I’d be more worried about knackered spokes than flatspots which you’d have already noticed just by spinning the wheel if you’ve retensioned it.

Definitely poor building. A well built wheel should be properly stretched, de-tensioned and sorted so it should never need a re-tension unless actually damaged. For a full wheel to go slack it has just been fired together and not built properly at all.

Any guides for building wheels on line?

Tis what I thought. I was planning on buying a set of flows from them too when I got the money together. Not now. Back to hope hoops for me.

The first thing I did when I got them was checked the tension they seemed ok, hence why I’m staggered at how bad they were after 2 rides and 30miles…

GEDA – wheelpro is the one everyone recommends.

+1 for Wheelpro, £9 well spent IMO.

+1 for Wheelpro, £9 well spent IMO.

Except Wheelpro are no longer selling, so not a very useful recommendation.

What spoke nipples are they? Alloy ones I find are crap Brass all the way!The art of wheelbuilding by Gerd Schraner is the best book I have found. If you look on amazon you can purchase it for about £10. Good luck with the wheels 😀

Whereabouts are you DT78?

Except Wheelpro are no longer selling, so not a very useful recommendation.

Yeah they are and a very good recommendation

http://www.wheelpro.co.uk/wheelbuilding/book.php

Luckily they are brass nipples which I’m glad of!

Matt – Southampton based Wheels have had their initial outings in the radcore Lordswood so we aren’t talking wheel destroying terrain here either!

Ah, I was thinking I could help you out and re-true and tension them for you but I’m up in Sheffield so not really handy

Thanks for the offer Matt, appreciated, but I think a little too far!

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html

I used this guide for building my first wheels. Much easier than I expected. The hardest thing is getting the right length of spokes.
I still buy handbuilt wheels for my tourer. I’m not going to risk my own wheels over several thousand miles away from home. Like many other skills learning a little makes you appreciate the skills of a pro. Spa Cycles are my choice. I’m 16 stone and have always broken spokes in factory wheels after a couple of thousand miles touring or commuting. My rear wheel from Spa is still perfectly tensioned and true after 6k miles loaded touring.

The main benefit IMO for building a wheel or two is that I am now competely confident I could deal with any spoke tuning/replacement needed on the road. I used an old scrap frame with a couple of bolts through the stays to true the rim. Dishing was done by turning the wheel round to make sure it was still centred. Works Ok for the odd wheel. A proper wheel jig would make like easier for regular builds.

+1 for Wheelpro, £9 well spent IMO.

Except Wheelpro are no longer selling, so not a very useful recommendation.

he’s still out there, selling his book which is pretty good TBH.

it does deal mostly with building new wheels from a strength round rim, but covers re-trueing too. worth a few quid.

DT
If you are anywhere near shropshire, i’ll stick them in the jig for you.
email in profile
Cheers
Paul

Thanks for the offer Paul, I’m down south though.

DT78, did they sound tight when you first got them?

I thought the octo-boy’s wheels were supposed to be very well built? Back along I remember a whole heap of moaning about the freehubs but not the build, pretty sure a couple of people mentioned how good the build was.

Maybe someone new is ‘building’ them as I imagine he shifts quite a few more sets now than he did a couple of years ago. I suppose you wonder how they get built: if he has a workshop monkey lace them and nip the spokes up to vaguely ‘pingable’ tension before getting someone more experienced to finish them, maybe the OP’s set slipped through the final true/tension.

Or maybe they are just a really really poor build!

I thought they did, I pinched each pair of spokes and they seemed alright, I didn’t ping each one individually though, just a couple.

I bought them after speaking to them at the London Bike Show and having a proper decent look at the hubs they had there. The hubs looked good and the chap I spoke to seemed to know his stuff and be genuine.

I’ve never had any issues with their pads but know of their reputation on here, googling around wheelsets seem to get the thumbs up so thought I’d give them a try as I wanted to try a rear hub with better engagement than a proII (I went for a superlegga)

Maybe I just got the work experience boy doing my build.

That said the front still seems ok, would have thought the same chap would have built the set.

Theres a chance whoever built the wheel used grease instead of spoke prep. I know because when i started building wheels years ago, i did a road wheel for someone using grease. All spokes came loose very quick, oops. You live and learn.

Well I just posted a review on their website to aid other buyers.

Will be interested if it stays up there.

http://superstar.tibolts.co.uk/product_reviews_info.php?products_id=427&reviews_id=780

Just thought I’d update with some positive news, SS contacted me based on this thread to discuss my issues. They were helpful, offered advice on the correct spoke tension and offered to take the wheels back to check them over. I’m going to see how they run in over the next couple of runs as it will be a pain to send them back and be without my new wheels (though I still have my trusty proII 4.2s).

Got the feeling I should have video’d the spoke looseness as I think they thought I was exaggerating with the looseness, but overall a postive customer experience.

So much so that I actually bought the plasma guide I’d been thinking about for a while.

Think I was just unlucky tbh. We shall see after another couple of rides.

Theres a chance whoever built the wheel used grease instead of spoke prep. I know because when i started building wheels years ago, i did a road wheel for someone using grease. All spokes came loose very quick, oops. You live and learn.

Thats interesting (well, stretching the meaning of the word slightly there..) because Mr Wheelpro recommends using a light lube such as Teflon Spray, which allows you to tighten the nipples easier and results in a smoother build. I’ve done this before successfully.

Usually I just use copper grease. No real logic behind it any more, other than its always worked for me, nothing comes loose but two years down the line the nipples still tighten and loosen easily.

A friend of mine had a very similiar experience with his, they sent a replacement set and told him “You ride too hard for our all mountain wheels, you need the downhill ones”- this for use at glentress on a 456. Never saw the first set but the second ones aren’t that well built either, you’d expect a replacement set like that to be the best they can do really.

I was taught to use boiled linseed oil on the nipples when building as it lubricates the nipple, rim and spoke meaning everything sits much nicer and theres a lot less pinging and grief when stressing; the guy builds over 2000 wheels a year and problems regarding builds were incredibly rare to say the least.

The other benefit are it sets so is like a light loctite and is dirt cheap.

I use a dab of grease too, and haven’t had any problems, despite the wheels getting a pounding on the DH bike.

Ordinary car engine oil is fine (its all in the Wheelpro book/PDF).

Well – I thought I’d do a little thread resurrection. Just checked back on the superstar site, and guess what?! My comments about the quality of the wheel build have magically disappeared. A couple of 5star comments remain from January so mine hasn’t timed out it’s been deleted.

Gave the chap a chance – looks like what is said on here is true.

What is also interesting is there now are 4 more recent comments on there reporting the quality of the rear wheel build to be crap. Wonder how long till they disappear too. The response is they have had less than 1% reported problems with 500 wheelsets. Well those 4 + my comment which was deleted = 1% and that doesn’t account for others who didn’t post comment or been deleted…

Good news is, after I spent well over an hour retensioning and trueing the rear myself it seems to be working great….

Now as SS have lost a customer can anyone recommend where to buy disk pads?

From one of those reviews:

Hello im sorry you are having an issue with your wheels. I think it is unlikely that there was an issue with the build tension because it would be impossible to achieve 0.2mm runout if the wheels were not tight enough. Its impossible to comment without seeing them in person, so I suggest if you haven’t returned them please do.

Because crest rims are ultralight I recommend not to just crank up the tension. They can fail if massively overtensioned, and need to be built with the correct tools.

We do offer on all our wheels a free truing service at any time in the future, and crash replacement prices if they are beyond repair.

Our wheels are built by experienced wheelbuilders who have built well into the thousands (actually probably tens of thousands come to think of it) of wheels. We use the best quality sapim nipples and spokes, very expensive and accurate wheel jigs to produce extremely reliable wheels. We have built over 500 pairs of stans wheels for this offer with much less than 1% issues reported.

If you do have an issue and have not contacted us I suggest this as the first course of action as we are waiting to help if you ever have a problem.

I think I remember Fruit/neil/octo teaching himself the wheelbuilding initially. My mates SS wheels have a very low spoke tension and it wont be long before they need some spoke key attention.

http://www.discobrakes.com/

it would be impossible to achieve 0.2mm runout if the wheels were not tight enough

that is nonesense I could achieve that with very little tension or even massively uneven tension or massively overtensioned
Poor service again
CRC remove poor reviews as well IME

Hmm just found this thread after experiencing the same thing with SS wheelset – Crests on EVO hubs. They weren’t straight from the start and I just realised I have several spokes completely loose on the rear wheel 😐 Going by the comments on their site the last few months seem to have been a bad spell for their wheelbuilder!

The odd thing is, they definately can build good wheels- I’ve seen a few that were as spot on (almost on a par with my wheelpro set). But others are just totally s**t.

“I thought the octo-boy’s wheels were supposed to be very well built?”

Well my switch ones seem OK to me. I recently put a derailler into the rear but the wheel seemed OK, then a spoke snapped a couple of rides later – not unexpected. New spoke and rough re-true – we’ll see how we go.

A friends recent bought a Giant Defy, and within 10 commutes to work, many of the non-drive-side spokes have gone really slack (10mm of flex side to side) and the rim is out of shape. It’s going back to the shop.

My set of stans crest/evo was crap out the box front was 10mm out of true & the rear had no tension.