Berd PolyLight Spokes. Silly-light Polymer Spokes

[MaraudingWalrus]

Update on this after some more time.

Sent initial wheels to Berd for them to investigate the apparent corrosion issue, which they hadn't seen before. Climate the particular wheels exist in is legitimately extremely corrosive, so that's actually possible that Berd hadn't seen before. They took some time to look over the wheels and investigate and do some brain work.

They came to the conclusion that we had a couple of options.

First being do nothing - Berd believed that, structurally, the wheels were fine, and that if the corrosion continued at its (slow) pace, then the wheels/rims would likely reach the end of their service life anyway before any serious consequence came up.


The second option was a bit of a middle road - they offered to coat the existing spokes black. Now this seems a bit of a bandaid hiding a problem solution, but their reasoning behind offering this was that whatever they use to coat the spokes black is evidently somewhat more difficult for moisture to penetrate, so it would sort of insulate the steel insert and potentially prevent it from getting worse.

Third option being new spokes (at extremely discounted spoke price in either black or white) with either me re-lacing them or them re-lacing them for small build fee. I opted to re-lace myself with black spokes - my customer originally bought wheels from me because they were built by me - seemed like I should continue to have the wheels built by me.

We obviously went with a re-build, with black spokes as the white had gotten dingy over time. Some minor doubt lingers in the back of my mind that now we'd have no way to know if future spokes start corroding as it wouldn't be as easily visible on black vs white, but some product changes from Berd ease my mind a bit on that.


Now that aside, those technical updates from Berd. The spoke length calculation algorithm has continued to improve. This means that they lengths given by their calculator are closer than previous, meaning there's a less likely chance of the spokes being a smidge short, which can be quite a pain when lacing - these spokes stretch a moderate bit when first built so they come on the short side to prepare for that. However, any too short, and you've got a heck of a time actually lacing them.

Most importantly, I'd say, they have switched supplier of the actual stainless steel insert portion of their spoke. My guess is that now as they've a) been around a little longer and b) sold more stuff and are able to c) buy more stuff they have been able to get a higher quality supplier of that base stainless insert (did not say which manufacturer) who likely has a higher grade of stainless.

In addition, the stainless insert now has a flat spot built into it, allowing holding of the stainless insert with a small pronged tool to prevent wind up. This is significantly faster and less cumbersome than the above mentioned method - which was some channel locks with leather pads to clamp down on the spoke and hold it from spinning.

All in all, I'm satisfied with this resolution and the product improvements - as was my client. Enough that I'm working on another build for them - very shallow Nextie carbon clinchers with the newish Onyx Vesper road hubs. These came in about the same ballpark weight as the Enve 3.4/DT 240 combination mentioned above, despite the serious weight penalty of the Onyx hubs. I'll update with details on that some time when the build is finished all the way.

Both the rebuilt Enve/DT and the Nextie/Onyx wheels have been laced up, initially trued and tensioned, and are now sitting for a few days while the spokes stretch to their final length before I re-tension and ship them off.

[ergott]

Great, nice update.

I'm a bit disappointed they didn't comp you new spokes as a company this new still has to sort out final specs. They basically used you and your customer and now they learned something out of the long term data too. But I digress.

I would love to try building a set of wheels with these. At some point I will.

[November Dave]

The black coating will almost certainly be some variant of maxi jacket. All of these fibers start life in industrial applications (dyneema rope was developed for the mining industry) and then filter into sailing and other downstream uses. Maxi Jacket is some sort of urethane that coats the fibers.

I can't see any waterproofing benefit to the coating. The 12 strand weave that these fiber spokes are is pretty darn porous. The fibers themselves are hydrophobic but the spaces between the fibers sure aren't.

[reuben]

I just found out about these, and, uh, wow. lower case wow.

I searched the paceline, and, sure enough, I'm years behind the times, as usual. But only 3 years this time instead of 30.

They now come in both white and black.

Depending on who you ask and how honest they're being, I'm either old or getting old, but I just can't see this on my road bike. MTB? I dunno, maybe. I don't ride off road so I can't offer any sort of reasonable response, other than that intuitively they make more sense in that environment. But that's just intuition.

As an engineer I'm open to new ideas, new technologies, etc. As a curmudgeon who likes simple things, I'm not. Worlds collide... in my brain.

I guess if one breaks you could still use it to floss your teeth, sew up a tubular tire, walk your dog, but... no, not me. Not on the road. And probably not anywhere else if I add other milieus.

(old man shakes fist at cloud)

[mtechnica]

The dyneema ones sound more promising than these IMO

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by mtechnica

The dyneema ones sound more promising than these IMO

Dyneema is a just trade name for the same material used for the Berd spokes (UHMWPE, or Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethelene).

[mtechnica]

Originally Posted by Mark McM

Dyneema is a just trade name for the same material used for the Berd spokes (UHMWPE, or Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethelene).

Lol my bad thanks for the info.

[MikeD]

As I remember these spokes have about half the stiffness of equivalent stainless steel spokes. Would I would be more likely to taco the wheel or damage the rim from a side load or pothole with these spokes vs. steel?

[oldpotatoe]

HA...was driving to Denver when I remembered the name of these things..'re-inventing' the wheel. Didn't they make a MTB version?

[jamesdak]

So two/three years or so is all the spokes made it before a decision had to be made to replace or not??

Not seeing the logic of using these......

[MaraudingWalrus]

Just thought I'd post a quick update here.

Since we rebuilt those initial wheels with their newer spokes, we've had no issues. I really do think that as Berd grew they were able to secure more mainstream suppliers. I suspect this allowed them to get a higher quality stainless spoke to use at the threaded end.

I also just finished up another wheelset with Berds, this time my first set using straight pull hubs. I was a little leery of the process, but it wound up going quite well - I preferred it to j-bend.

I built a 977g wheelset using Berds, some shallow rims from Nextie, and the Extralite Cyber SPD-3 hubset. Really stoked with them.

Front wheel weighs 454g, rear 522. Obviously missing a few tenths of grams here that my scale doesn't pick up that cause the two when weighed together to read 977.


Can't wait for the rider to get that wheelset on her bike!

[pasadena]

impressive weight! What do you think it cost all in?

[MaraudingWalrus]

Originally Posted by pasadena

impressive weight! What do you think it cost all in?

Iirc, we're right around $1700 in parts (spokes+nipples, hubs, rims) exclusive of shipping and labor costs.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

[Applesauce]

Resurrecting this chestnut… I’ve just ordered Berd spokes for a set of 24h MTB wheels. King hubs, WR1 Faction rims. Not only is twenty four hole an experiment for me, for trail bike wheels - but now they’re rope spokes, too.

[charliedid]

Lunatic Fringe