Trying to make my mind up between brass & alu on latest build. If anyone has experience of the alu variety (good or bad), please can you let me know.

Cheers

Alu only if it's a very light wheelset. They WILL seize and round when you try to true them. If you lube and freeze them you may get a few more months of happy truing, but they won't last!

Very bad – tiny weight saving in exchange for terminal hassle – avoid

Bad…they are made of soft cheese, and they will disintegrate in next to no time through corrosion.

As above great if you want to win the BAR but sh1te for everything else 🙄

Not a fan myself, my Traversees have them and about 50% of the time the nipples break rather than turning when I try to adjust the things. Course, I'm hamfisted but still.

Had some Bonty road wheels with them. Endless hassle with wheel tension; replaced them all with brass – problem solved.

Shouldn't you use the alloy nipples that are "star" shaped rather than round if you insist on going ally? You have a greater interface area between the nipple and tool so there is less chance of "rounding" you can also apply more force. As for corrosion – don't know.

If you can still get them then spline-drive alloy nipples are fine. No more risk of rounding off than brass in my experience.

Avoid due to seizing. Spline drive will seize also.

Alloy nips = hate hate hate!!!

But that easy weight saving can be ohh so seductive!
I think if I was really pushed by someone to use them then I'd only put them on the non drive side rear or non disc side front. They'd still seize after the first washing in road salt, but at least they'd be under lower tension.

njee20 – Member

Alu only if it's a very light wheelset. They WILL seize and round when you try to true them. If you lube and freeze them you may get a few more months of happy truing, but they won't last!

Norton – Member

Very bad – tiny weight saving in exchange for terminal hassle – avoid

Mary Hinge – Member

Bad…they are made of soft cheese, and they will disintegrate in next to no time through corrosion.

+ shed loads

Had alu nips on two previous sets of wheels, never had a problem other than when I needed to remove particularly bad kinks using inordinate amounts of tension, at which point they start to round if you dont use a decent firm fitting 4 sided spokey. Got them on a current front wheel, again no issues yet but my wheels haven't needed truing so far in 12 months so I can't comment on this one.

Loads of hassle on factory built wheels, never had any problems on ones i've built myself, putting it down to the fact that I coat the threads in copper grease(whatever the material) and use a decent spoke key of the correct size.Oh, and if you want to buy standard DT Ali ones, then give me a shout at Sunset tomorrow, we've got loads that are left over as all black spokes come with them but not everyone wants them.(02920371321)

Hmm….thanks for the feedback.

TBH, as I've some knowledge of metallurgy, I was a little sceptical about the longer term viability of alu nips. But the hopeless bike tart within me thought how nice red spoke nipples would look on my new red/black/white bike 🙄

As I'm looking for a pair of wheels that'll last me 10+ years, it looks like it'd be more sensible to go with brass nips (and perhaps save some weight by going for super comp rather than comp spokes?)

Correct.

Don't last if you have to tweak them and they can crack and fail (seen it on a mates bike) never had a brass on fail or round compared with Alu – That said if they are good alu nipples and you don't need to ever tru the wheel are OK 🙂

On the other hand they are lighter and they coe in fancy colours. I have got a set of 2 year old wheels from JRA a pairs of 5 year old Magura Pro which are still going fine with alu nipples.

The only wheels where I've had trouble are oem stuff whre the nipples seem to arrive seized on.

Just don't pair them with bladed spokes. That's a proper match made in hell when it comes to true them! Or, as I discovered at the weekend, straight pull bladed spokes with alu nips. It'd be easier to nail jelly to a tree than true those!