I have a 36" black v-shaped rim with 36 spokes.
I want to re-lace it with new spokes.
Is there a best lacing pattern?
Pretty sure you want to go 3 cross. I haven’t ridden a 4 cross, but I have read it can lead to a loss in lateral stiffness, which would be particularly bad on a uni. In any case you may not even be able to find spokes long enough to 4 cross a 36er wheel. Definitely don’t think about doing something crazy like radial spokes.
The standard is the best in this case.
I think you’re right about this. He doesn’t say what hub or other wheel specs, but given the relative scarcity of 36’r spokes, I’d say start with the spoke length and work backwards from there. Lacing up a custom 36’r wheel can be a challenge!
Definitely 3-cross! There’s no reason for other patterns, as far as I know, unless you are obsessed with aesthetics. Once I even asked master wheelbuilder Josh (formerly at UDC, now virtually at UDC) about this, and he told me that double-walled rims had made 4-cross unnecessary -“overkill,” I think he said.
Anyway, I have twice rebuilt my 20" wheel. The first time led to a spoke breaking every few weeks, but the second time was a smashing success, even though I had damaged a few rim eyelets with some of my earlier fiddling around. My wheel ended up stronger than before, I think, and hasn’t even needed truing in months, despite the fact that many bike shop mechanics had told me I should just buy a new one.
This doctor-said-I’d-never-walk-again story is largely the result of a tutorial and other advice posted here and other places by jtrops. He said his tutorial wasn’t meant to be comprehensive, but it is extremely helpful, and if you follow the links I posted in the discussion of it, you more or less end up with the full picture, at least as I understand it now. There may be some things to keep in mind when rebuilding a 36 instead of a 20, but I’ll let someone else fill you in on that.
If that’s an airfoil rim (the older V shaped rims that used to be available before the other double walled rims came out) it builds up 4x with the standard length spokes meant to build other 36" rims 3x.
Build it 4x with standard 36er spokes. There is no appreciable difference vs 3x, and it saves you the expense of getting custom spoke lengths.
There’s not really a lot of point in me posting since I know very little about the relative merits of different patterns, but I built a 29er wheel 32 spoke in a 2 cross pattern since that was the spokes I had available. They were too short for 3 cross. I’m a big guy and not a great wheel builder,and it’s still as true as when I first put it together after a year of riding.
In practice 2x is just about as good as 3x.
Think about the two adjacent spokes on a side of your wheel as a triangle from where they cross to the hub. In theory you will gain strength as the base of that triangle gets wider. So a radial pattern is pretty bad. Tangentially spoked wheels are much stronger than radial, but once you have a tangential pattern the added benefit of lower angles isn’t as significant.
Wheels with very large flanges, and short spokes often can’t be laced more than 1x, so there are reasons to use alternative patterns. High cross wheels don’t do you any good if the nipple angle in the rim is causing the nipple to seat poorly.
Thanks for all the expertise. I’ll order my spokes Monday morning!
PS: I love that sig: “A properly ridden unicycle is like an object in orbit: constantly falling but never landing.” -Diogenes
Thanks for that Jtrops, now I have some theory to go on rather than admitting I just used parts-bin spokes cos they were what I had at the time!