Originally Posted by
3alarmer
...random additional thoughts in no particular order.
How do you manage to sell decent spokes at your co-op for a nickel ?
If Mr Bunny is telling you you'll probably run out of threads, you really ought to check your calcs again.
Why anyone in your situation in terms of weight and function of the wheel would not be using straight 14g DT's or similar is beyond me.
Butted spokes are swell, but they usually stretch a little more at high tensions, thus adding to your dilemma.
I know that Jobst Brandt and every other guy on God's green earth tells us to go with db spokes, but I build
a lot of wheels with straight gauge 14's, and I make certain to aggressively relieve the elbows. They seem
to last me quite a while, but because I have them on a number of bikes, i cannot tell you how many miles
they go prior to failure......none of them have ever failed except for one that popped a spoke in a crash test.
A large amount of our new spokes were donated to us a few years ago. Not many people build wheels so we have dwindled the stock slowly. We sell stuff cheap to help the low income people. We also do recycle used spokes that are stainless and come off of usable wheels that usually are damaged by crash damage. However the popular sizes have almost run out like the 292/293/294.
As far as Mr Bunny telling me that I am going to run out of spoke threads, remember, the point of my question was that I found a stash of nice 295mm DB spokes since we have no decent 293 or 294mm spokes so I wondered if I could use them without running out of threads. When Mr Bunny ran the numbers (assuming he did), he came up with 292 and 294 for the lengths. Not all spoke calculators are created equal and I know that some come up with different numbers compared to others. I think I could get away with 2mm exposed threads but 3mm? That is what Mr Bunny was pointing out, that might be too much and I would run out of thread.
If this is all an exercise in futility, I will probably just make a trip out the bike shop that I know has a Phil Woods machine and get 70 or so nice new 299mm straight gauge spokes that I do have chopped to the proper 292/294 lengths but the trip to the shop is a 70 mile round trip and that is about 11 dollars in gas and then the time. At that point, it might behoove me to just order a set of inexpensive spokes from the JB Catalog and be done with it. But I want to build the wheels now! LOL