radial spoking front wheel
 

More wheel quesitons. I am going to radial spoke my front wheel I am building with 24 holes, can I use the standard front hubs and do this? I do see some manufactures have hubs specifically for radial spoking. I was going to use the standard shimano type hubs 24/28. Do I need to watch the kind of hub for the front?

Yeah.

Years ago Shimano hubs weren't designed for radial spokeing and sometimes broke out at the hub flange. The most recent ones have a little more meat added to the hub flange and are radial spoke-able. If you look at the hubs side-by-side it's easy to tell the difference. On the good ones the spoke holes look like they have about 3 1/2 mm between the hole and the edge of the hub flange.

Also a few folks, me included, would advise against switching a used hub from crossed to radial spoking due to the pressure marks left by the crossed pattern spokes in the hub flange and edges of the holes. So get a new hub or use one that was radial spoked already. In particular with a low spoke count wheel such as a 24 I'd suggest that this is even more important than on a 32 spoke wheel.

shimano has a limit on radial spoking. I think that it is 24 holes. If you like the looks, that fine, but there is no real advantage to radial spoking.

It's not 24h. It's less.

http://www.fa-technik.adfc.de/Herste...SI-WH00H_E.pdf

This PDF tells you what hubs are radially lace approved, from shimano.

Aside from being a couple of grams lighter, it's a tad more aero, innit?

I'm told Cyclocrossers stopped getting so much of the countryside flora
stuck in the cross of the spokes,
by not crossing them, ... but its mostly for looks..

nope

I have an older Sora 36 hole front hub that is radially laced and it has held up fine for years.

Laced heads-in they're a few percent laterally stiffer than wheels laced in cross patterns. Now whether that actually means anything or not is another thing entirely.

On the flipside, a radial wheel laced heads-out would have to be more aero.

No 'nope' about it.

AFAIK they're typically laced heads-in though... and I seem to remember reading an article which claimed a small aero benefit for such a wheel; I think this proposition deserves more than a single word in reply.

After all, it stands to reason that a heads-in radial wheel should create less turbulence thanks to all the spokes on each side passing through the same spot... on the other hand, plain radial spokes passing through the 12 o'clock position (where they go twice road speed) present a circular cross section, whereas plain tangential spokes present an elliptical section by virtue of their angle. An interesting question whether one effect cancels the benefit of the other, but this could be side-stepped by using elliptical or bladed spokes.

Have to set up a real OCD test facility to tell any aero difference between head in and head out , how small a fraction of time/distance change will be significant?

FWIW
Brompton's Front wheels are laced radial , heads out , to fit in the fork,
only 75mm wide.
except when theres a dyno-hub put in there, those cross.

Flange is larger diameter too , so further from the dropout.

Admittedly we're talking small benefits here, but take three or four such small differences, and they can add up to something worthwhile.

Not the sort of thing you'd strip and rebuild a good wheelset to achieve, but if you're speccing a new one, IMO there's good reason to include every half-percenter you can think of.

According to Rinard's wheel test:"Because the bracing angle is increased, radial wheels are about 13% stiffer elbows out, all else equal."

Assuming that a cross pattern behaves pretty much as a mix between elbows out and in, radial, elbows out should be several whole % laterally stiffer than cross lace.

Just quietly, I think I'd prefer a slight aero advantage to a large lateral rigidity advantage...

I came across a very good argument not long ago that lateral rigidity is almost entirely superfluous for a bike wheel under normal riding conditions... You really have to try to induce significant lateral loads in a wheel; holding the bike vertical and hanging off the inside while cornering, for example.

Most of the time the wheel is tilted to take cornering loads at an angle quite close to its plane.

People do cross-1 elbows out builds...

You're quite right, but there are bikes and there are bikes.
It used to bug me (probably entirely out of proportion) to hear the "swosh, swosh" in synch with my cadence when climbing out of the saddle on my sus fork MTB. A radial relace heads-in removed the brake rub and provided peace of mind.

And while the added lateral rigidity might not do any good, I can't come up with a situation where it'd be a disadvantage either.

One should be able to use it as a trade-in:
- Thinner spokes increase lateral flex
- heads-in reduce lateral flex
- going from cross to radial, heads-in might allow you to go down one size in spoke diameter while retaining the lateral rigidity of the original build.

What! I thought it was against the law or something to eat the cake and have it too ;-)

Oops, forgot about sprinting or climbing... prolly cause I'm pretty light and have only experienced the above on truly pathetic wheels.