Road Race Wheels Cerca 1986

[Kontact]

Originally Posted by stien

It's circa not cerca

It's Stien not stien

[Gummee]

Originally Posted by bikinchris

Early in my career, I built sets of wheels for a pair of twin 13 year old girls to race:
28 hole GEL 280 fronts with Titanium spokes and 32 hole GEL 330 rears with DT Revolution on Record hubs with Ti axles.
I wouldn't even test ride bikes with those wheels, since I weighed more than both of the girls added together.

I still have a few pairs of wheels worth of Ti spokes. GL330s and ti spokes were a very interesting ride. Always felt like I had a flat.

Very light tho

Prior to the GL330s, I'd built a few pair of CXP30s with the Ti spokes. I don't remember if they were 24/24 or 24/28. 1st set was raidal NDS in the rear. Felt great going straight ahead, but wonky if you turned one way. ...but not the other!

Sold that wheelset to a triathlete and rebuilt em 2x and they felt as fine as Ti spokes felt.

M

[ultraman6970]

As potato said, if you are racing you need a pair of wheels that can take you to the finish line, that being said... my pick was some like heavy but never had problems even getting flats... 36h 3x gp4 rims.. alpina spokes and campy or shimano hubs, 23 mm tubbies in the road... 22 or 21 in the track and for TT in the track I had 19mm 160 grams tubbies. For TT in the road always played safe...23 or 22 mm. Had wheels built with nisi superwhatever the equivalent of the gp4 in nisi, I still have those rims moving around and still could built a set of wheels with them...

For training I used ambrosio montreal that IMO were in the soft side but were cheap enough to get them replaced often in case of way too many dents

[Kontact]

Originally Posted by Gummee

I still have a few pairs of wheels worth of Ti spokes. GL330s and ti spokes were a very interesting ride. Always felt like I had a flat.

...rebuilt em 2x and they felt as fine as Ti spokes felt.

Feeling like you have a flat is "fine"?

I can't tell if you like Ti spokes or not.

[bikinchris]

When you got the Ti spokes tight, they were fine and felt just like stainless spokes. BUT you have to build the wheels, then re-tension them after riding them a while.

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by Hindmost

One word: Extrusion. Another Paceliner once pointed out that prior to this, aluminum rims were essentially rolled sheet, welded into seamed tubing, then shaped into rims. The aluminum had to be soft enough for the shaping to occur. Low spoke count wheels were not an option with the resulting rims..

As you say, a relatively soft aluminum alloy must be used for rims that are formed from sheets. In many instances, the extrusion process actually increases the strength of the aluminum by a form of heat treating - the alloy is first heated to soften it so that it can be pushed through the extrusion die, and then is quenched after it emerges from the die.

But perhaps more importantly, extrusion allows greater control of rim wall thickness - the rim walls can be made thick at the spoke bed and brake tracks, but thin on the rest of the sidewalls, so the rim can be stiffer and stronger at the same weight than a rim made from a (constant thickness) sheet.

[Kontact]

The thing is that extruded rims aren't "modern", so it really isn't a great explanation for the more recent reduction in spoke number.

I'm willing to bet if you found a mid-'80s Matric ISO aero 36H rim and laced it to an 18H hub, it would hold up no different than a "modern" rim.

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by carpediemracing

I didn't read through all the answers but the short answer: stronger rims.

Back in the day I used to run 280g rim tubulars, which were probably 300-330g actual weight, but still, very light. Nowadays you won't find many rims like that in aluminum (any?) and "light" rims are 400-450g, which was as heavy as they got back then.

Such rims required a higher minimum number of spokes because the spokes were an integral part of the load rating.

As you say, lightweight rims are not a modern innovation, there were plenty of lightweight rims back in the day. The GEL280 rims mentioned several times here were light, but they weren't the lightest. I've got an old pair of Weyless rims that are about 215 grams each. I've also got a few Super Champion rims that are about 260-280 grams. And one of the first "aero" rims, the Saavedra Turbo rims (also mentioned elsewhere) had an actual weight of about 280 grams. All tubulars, of course. As also mentioned already, what is a new innovation is lightweight rims that are also reasonably durable.

As you say, these very light rims did require many spokes to avoid very flexy wheels, and to get even a minimal amount of durability. 36 spokes was the norm for these very light rims - 32 spokes was reserved for medium weight rims.

Originally Posted by carpediemracing

However, with a heavier rim, the spokes do less weight bearing work and really just position the hub within the rim. With a 280g rim if you sat hard on an unlaced rim you'd bend it. With a 400g rim, less of a chance, and, nowadays, a 450g carbon rim can support quite a bit of weight without being laced. Heavier/stronger rims no longer needed the spokes to help support the weight, so you could find some crazy low spoke counts (down to 12 spokes for the aluminum Shamals, which weighed a lot in order to be strong enough), and even now you'll see 18 spoke front wheels (HED Ardennes type rim, of which I have a couple).

These comments seem to echo some of the misconceptions about how wheels work, especially the comment that "Heavier/stronger rims no longer needed the spokes to help support the weight." Clearly, a rim can not support weight without spokes - since the spokes are the only connection between the rim and the hub, the spokes always bear the entire load.

The wheel is a classic pre-stressed structure. At any time, only a few spokes are actually supporting the external load - these spokes are the spokes closest to the ground contact point. The rest of the spokes are there to maintain the pre-tension on the load supporting spokes. The role of rim stiffness is that a stiffer rim distributes loads over a wider area, thus allowing the spokes to be further apart and still have the same number of spokes bearing the load. And spokes being further apart means fewer total spokes. So modern wheels can have fewer spokes not because the rim is stronger, but because the rim is stiffer.

[pbarry]

I brought "good used rims" to Peter a few years ago to lace to 9 speed Campy hubs. Weighed the GEL 280 for the front, and the GEL 330 for the rear. Both came in at 330g. There may have been some optimistic marketing going on back in the day.
That wheelset is one of favorites, despite the rim being 50g over advertised weight..

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by Kontact

The thing is that extruded rims aren't "modern", so it really isn't a great explanation for the more recent reduction in spoke number.

I'm willing to bet if you found a mid-'80s Matric ISO aero 36H rim and laced it to an 18H hub, it would hold up no different than a "modern" rim.

Extrusion is fine way to make a rim, but older extrusion processes had a harder time maintaining consistancy with very thin walls. So many of the earlier ultra-light rims (less than 400 grams, such as the GEL280 & GL330) were made from forming from sheets, and extrusions were used for heavier rims. This started changing by the late '80s.

Another change was advancements in rolling. Rims are made by forming straight tubes or extrusions, and then bending (rolling) them into a hoop. The deeper the cross section, the more likely it is to distort when rolling into a hoop - this is especially true if the rim has thin walls. This is why the very lightest rims were also quite shallow. Improvements in rolling technology has allowed deeper cross section rims to be made (although 40 mm is still about the maximum feasible limit, and most alloy rims today are typically 30 mm or less).

As has been mentioned, the recent reduction in spoke count isn't all that recent, as 24 spoke wheels were available since the '70s. I suspect that one of the reasons that not many rims were available in low spoke count in the '80s is several fold: Since the bicycle industry can often be quite conservative, and since 32 and 36 spoke wheels were the norm, manufacturers (and wheel builders) were not ready to jump to lower spoke counts. Plus, since 32 and 36 spoke wheels were the norm, there just weren't many low spoke count hubs avaible. When I built my first 24 spoke wheels, there weren't many rims and hubs widely available.

But as you say, if an '80s rim with a similar cross section and depth as modern rims was used, you could likely use the same reduced spoke count as is common on similar rims today.

[Kontact]

Originally Posted by Mark McM

The wheel is a classic pre-stressed structure. At any time, only a few spokes are actually supporting the external load - these spokes are the spokes closest to the ground contact point. The rest of the spokes are there to maintain the pre-tension on the load supporting spokes. The role of rim stiffness is that a stiffer rim distributes loads over a wider area, thus allowing the spokes to be further apart and still have the same number of spokes bearing the load. And spokes being further apart means fewer total spokes. So modern wheels can have fewer spokes not because the rim is stronger, but because the rim is stiffer.

I can't see how this could be true. The hub isn't sitting on top of few spokes, it is dangling from the ones above it. If anything, the spokes connected to where the rim touches the ground have the least load on them because the pressure from the ground decreases the pre-tension on those spokes.

[Tandem Rider]

I had a 24 spoke TT front wheel back in the late 80's, Araya rim if I recall. It was a noodle, don't corner hard, it'll raise your heart rate. I'm pretty hard on wheels but I was only 145lbs at the time and it needed truing pretty frequently. I had GP4's for most stuff including training, and GL 330's on 32 spokes for the important races. 2.0-1.8 DT spokes on everything except the TT wheel. It had aero somethings, Alpina maybe. I think I still have a set of 36 hole GP4 wheels that I trained on hanging somewhere. I would go through 6 or 8 racing rims per year, probably 60 or 70 races.

My buddy had a Roval set of wheels, pretty cutting edge and fast. They were the first ones I ever saw like that.

No way would a set of low spoke count wheels hold up on standard 80's rims, I would have pretzeled those on the first ride.

[bikinchris]

Originally Posted by Kontact

I can't see how this could be true. The hub isn't sitting on top of few spokes, it is dangling from the ones above it. If anything, the spokes connected to where the rim touches the ground have the least load on them because the pressure from the ground decreases the pre-tension on those spokes.

The wheel will fail if the spokes it is "standing on" lose tension. So if the sum of the tension of all of the loaded spokes is not higher than the load, then the wheel will taco. More crosses builds a stronger wheel, because the spokes lean on each other so to speak.

[Kontact]

Originally Posted by bikinchris

The wheel will fail if the spokes it is "standing on" lose tension. So if the sum of the tension of all of the loaded spokes is not higher than the load, then the wheel will taco. More crosses builds a stronger wheel, because the spokes lean on each other so to speak.

I didn't mean the tension goes to zero. But it has to net decrease from compression. Forces could never remain completely symmetrical.

[El Chaba]

Originally Posted by Hindmost

Set the Wayback Machine Sherman:

Say I was building road race wheels for Colombian climbers to use in a professional, three week stage race in France. What spokes and lacing would I use?

Also, I could use suggestions for spokes that are still currently available.

Back to the original post....Many of the Colombian teams were Mavic-sponsored, so I'd start there..

1986 was the 7-speed era for pros, and aerodynamics had come into the consciousness of everybody and had supplanted weightweeniness to a great degree...So...

I would say Mavic SSC hubs, 126 mm spacing. Mavic SSC rims, 28 hole drilling. DT stainless spokes, probably 15g as those light, straight gauge spokes were common then, x2. Maillard 700 freewheel. Vittoria tubulars. Corsa CX for the front, Corsa CG for the rear.

A note on the SSC rims...The pros lucky enough to be sponsored by Mavic almost always got them....Very few non pros would pony up the $100/rim. For regular road race duty, it is the "regular" SSC and not the Pave model...