Originally Posted by
ColnagoC40
Oh well what more can I say?
There are two ways to look at this.
1.) Build with oil, or nothing and get your customers back a couple or more times a year to true wheels because eventually they will go out of true due to the odd spoke loosing tension, as it vibrates loose. They will need maintenance. This is the preferred way nowadays as it is more profitable to your business.
2.) Use a compound which lubricates with an easy breakable bond and build the wheel once needing no maintenance until the spokes fatigue and brake, after about 20,000 to 40,000 miles. The customer comes back after 3 to 6 years and you rebuild the whole wheel. This is the honest way, but not preferred as it makes less money.
The old timers who taught me used linseed oil, in the galvanized spoke days and they cut their teeth on building with wooden rims.
...look, if you want to keep going at this, I'm game for a couple more posts, but I dio have a short attention span, so you can't just repeat the same thing over and over again.
Here's something you might (or might not) want to consider. You seem to think for some reason that a properly tensioned wheel that has oil or grease in the threads of the spoke/nipple interface will loosen because of vibration. I (and I'm not alone in pointing this out to you) have constructed many and various spoked bike wheels, tensioned them to relatively high tensions, and not experienced the problem, as you describe it. So you might want to consider that if your spoke tensions on your finished wheels are inadequate to hold the tensions as built, maybe they are too low.
You will now tell me that you are going by the rim makers recommendations as to tension, and then repeat your point about the non-drive spokes on a dished wheel going to the low side.
All I can tell you is that if your wheels are tensioned so low on those spokes that they will unwind when ridden, you may be able to remedy it with spoke prep or Loctite.
But if those spokes are flexing so much they unwind under riding, they are flexing enough that your customer will doubtless experience premature failure of those spokes because of the fatigue induced by that selfsame flexing. My opinion is that youi are doing no one any favors. my opinion is based on a reasonable appreciation of what's going on in a wheel. I'm sorry that it hurts your feelings, but the fact that i am old does not mean I have not kept up with the technology. i just think you are making some assumptions about what's going on inside the nipples that has no basis in fact. I recall reading in one of Jobst Brandt's rants on this topic that he felt Wheelsmith produced and marketed Spoke prep because it was faster and easier to build wheels with lower tensions. So all your BS about honesty and service is based on a false premise. As is your understanding of the mechanics involved. If the odd spoke is loosening, you are undertensioning your wheels. Sad, but true.
I'll tell you who started thread locking juice. It was Rick and JonHjertberg with their wheel building machine. Before they could get tight spokes with the early Holland Mechanics machine because it couldn't handle spike twist, they invented the stuff to be able toship loose wheels. I was there and observed the problem. In fact the machine could not true a 1.8mm swaged spoke wheel. It just twisted the nipples back and fourth an 1/8 of a turn and got nowhere.That wheels built on the margin of durability could last a little time was achieved by using linseed oil a long time ago. Using a dry powdered wax in paste form is what WS markets. Bad wheels need lots of help to survive.
Spoke lube (Jobst Brandt)
It's long, but if you have a genuine interest in this topic, and are doing this stuff for money, you ought to read it and know about it. Your choice, amigo. No skin here.