New Front Wheel for Gunnar

I don't really have a good excuse for doing this, but I've built a new front wheel for Gunnar. As you might remember, currently he's running Wolfgang's old Alex-DA16-on-Deore 36 spoke wheel. While this works just fine, the internal rim width of the DA16 is 16.3 mm (at least according to their website) and thus technically a teeny tiny bit to small for my 700x23 tires. But I admit: this is a lame excuse for my urge to build a new wheel. An additional boost to this urge actually came from a gift from my friend Löby, who gave me an old but functional dial indicator. The idea is to mount it to my truing stand, theoretically allowing me to true wheels down to 0.01mm. Well, I'm still working on the attachment to the stand which turns out to be a bit tricky.

But I've built up the wheel anyway. It's a 32 spoke Mavic Open Pro with DT Swiss Comp 2.0/1.8 spokes on an Shimano Ultegra HB-6600 front hub. After lacing the wheel the wrong way twice, three times was the charm and now it's all trued and tensioned. Figuring out the correct spoke tension was a little tricky because my Wheelsmith tensiometer's calibration table only gives values for their own double-butted spokes which are 2.0/1.7 and not 2.0/1.8. But since the absolute value for spoke tension is not that crucial anyway (Mavic recommends 1050-1100 N) it shouldn't matter too much.

One final note about the wheel: the Open Pros don't come with a wear indicator. Therefore I've measured the thickness of the rim's sidewall. A trick to do this: attach a little magnetic ball to your caliper in order to get around the flange of the rim. My measurements came to almost exactly 1.5mm. This should give me a good point of reference for judging rim wear.