[9tubes]

Originally Posted by Mark McM

A lot of hypotheses and conjectures have been made about how the number of spoke crossings affects wheel strength, stiffness and durability, but in reality, it makes little difference. Henri Gavin (at Duke University) built and instrumented a set of wheels with differing numbers of crossing, and measured the stresses and strains in the spokes while they were in being ridden, as well as measuring their radial and lateral stiffnesses. He found that the number of crossings had no meaningful difference in spoke loading or fatigue, and only a minor differences in stiffness, which is shown in his published paper:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ba5...32b5450e4d.pdf

Thanks! I love seeing real data rather than folklore.