he says he has no idea. His attitude is “get me the right spokes and I’ll do it”. He builds lots of BMX and MTB wheels but just uses the specs provided by the suppliers. In other words, he’s good at building wheels because he does it all day but can’t do the math.

from what I’ve read in Sheldon Brown the 26 to 24 trick is just to skip every 4th hole in the hub. From what I’ve read here I probably don’t want to go more acute than 1x.

But I still can’t get a definite spoke length. Every online spoke calculator gives me a slightly different answer.

then there’s this from Sheldon Brown;

“I've built a few rear wheels using 24 hole rims and 24 spokes in 36 hole hubs. I used a spoke length calculator to find the correct spoke lengths.

I entered the number of spokes in the rim (24), and corrected for the different number of holes in the hub by using a decimal number (2.17) for cross. Not many spoke length calculators let you enter a decimal number for cross; I wrote Spocalc.xls in order to do it. Of course, you could just add a millimeter or two to the spoke length, but naturally I wanted to calculate it exactly :-)”

so I figure if I could get the right spoke measurement for a 24 hole Alfine 11 laced 1x on a 406 rim I can just add one mm and buy that length?