Originally Posted by
rousseau
I just went and tore the thing apart. I'm going to start afresh tomorrow.
This is the final thing that occurred to me. According to Roger Musson's excellent wheelbuilding book, you do the first eight spokes on one side of the hub, and then the first spoke on the other side goes through the hole which is offset just slightly to the left of the spoke you started with when looking at the hub from the side. Maybe I didn't get that right? I'll see how it goes tomorrow.
Light just went on: I have a Campy Record rear hub that a friend gave me in a box of old parts in which the holes on the two flanges are not offset from each other. They are exactly opposite one another: a spoke passed perpendicularly through one hole goes right through the hole on the other side. This caused problems when I tried to lace it up with new spokes: some are either too short or too long. My friend didn't build his own wheels when he was racing way back when and he doesn't remember anything weird about wheels built on that hub. But note that by the time he gave it to me it was just a hub, no longer a wheel. So perhaps there was a "story" there.....
If you look at your hub and discover that the holes on the other side aren't offset, Bingo!
I would think that the only way you could get this to work would be to figure out how much longer (or shorter, depending on which side you did first) half the spokes would need to be in order to reach the rim from a point on the hub that is 1/32nd of the circumference farther (or closer) than it should be.