Originally Posted by
gkamieneski
Read this thread with interest as I have Fulcrum 5s and also seem to have an EMail to that address that is going to go unanswered. I had a question on another forum about the direction the labeling should face on these 5s. Seems to me the Fulcrum wording across the hubs should read left to right on both hubs when viewed from behind the bicycle, but when I do that the yellow warning label and QRcode ends up on the NDS side of the rear wheel, but on the DS of the front wheel. See what your 2 sets of Fulcrum 5s look like for me? When building wheels, I always lined up the rim labeling and of course real Campy hubs are directional. These Fulcrums are handbuilt but doesn't seem that they gave the same thought to the process.
You peaked my interested and so had a look at both sets of Fulcrum 5's I run on two different bikes. Will preface and say, they are different designs as Fulcrum redesigned the 5's again in 2014 with some very nice changes and reduced gram weight a bit even though performance difference between the two wheelsets for me is indistinguishable.
Label direction. There are many ways to consider this. Call it a puzzle. Will say first hand, when it comes to design, if you get three engineers in a room, one or two will disagree.
This is my first hand experience. But important thing is to rule out human error on how your wheels were built with warning labels on the opposite side, this was deliberate and not accidental. Both of my Fulcrum 5 sets are the same.
Will give you a bit different paradigm when it comes to warning label side in particular. A notion is...Campy/Fulcrum doesn't want the label on the same side. This is for two reasons. If the label is affixed one on each side of the bike, there is a higher probability of reading it.
Second reasons is aesthetics. If there are two orange warning labels on the same side of the bike, your eye will go to this and is cosmetically distracting aka less attractive. So I believe that is the reasoning behind it.
Will give you another paradigm about hub labels. There is two schools there. If you think about it, you have latitude to install the front wheel either way. But not the rear wheel of course because the cassette has to go on the RHS. Difference in paradigm on hub label direction is....when you look at the rear hub label from the rear of the bike, it is properly attached....left to right.
Now for the front wheel, you can install the wheel either way. A differing view from what you said about label direction and interpretation about correctness is....just like when you look at the bike from the rear the hub label should read properly...how about when you are in front of the bike and you look at the bike from the front? The label should be legible but it wouldn't be if you had hub lettering with same orientation as the rear.
In summary, I believe there is deliberation to the way Campy/Fulcrum attaches their wheel and hub labels. This is mistake proofed in fact during the manufacturing process. It just might not fit your ideal precisely but I believe the way they did it can be explained.
Cheers.