Cycling UK Forum

I've been getting some nasty noises and occasional slipping from a freehub body so I opened it up for a look. One of the pawls feels a little 'lazy' even after all traces of grease were cleaned away so maybe the spring has lost of bit of power. The other possibility is wear on the ratchet serrations - could this really be as worn as it looks or was it manufactured this way?:


It may not even be simple wear - there was a sliver of rogue metal loose inside the body which could have broken off from one of the serrations. Unfortunately I'd already thrown it out before I noticed the wear so I can't check it for size now. Although shiny where they touch the serrations, the pawls looked fine and without wear.

Whatever the cause I think it's new freehub time.

reasonably durable and very repairable, where other wheels may not be either of these things

This tends to swing it for me these days. If you damage/wear out part of a hand built wheel it tends to be a whole heap easier to fix it than a factory built one. Broken a spoke? A few pence if you're happy to do yourself of just a few pounds if you need the LBS. With a factory built one of a few years old your first problem is getting hold of the esoteric item, and then paying through the nose for said part and quite possibly the special tool to fit it. Disc brakes mean you won't wear the rims out but you might damage them - again you're going to find that easier to deal with when a wheel is just a collection of off the shelf parts.

Could I ask you if your 9 speed set-ups, DA and Ultegra, were double or triple?

All doubles I’m afraid. I’ve never got on with tripples as I find the middle to inner shift so troublesome. The 9 speed shifters were bought back when I could ride at a respectable pace on 53x39 but these days I survive by grovelling along with an alpine double.

Glad the BB7s are much improved without the NSSLR lever pull. Unless you have poor quality spiral bound cable outers you may not see any further improvement with the compressionless ones - I didn’t when I swapped over from some quality Shimano ones.

Mine was new and it wasn’t ok. Its substantial error was in the other direction though. As a lockdown project I built a calibration jig as featured elsewhere in this forum. Now the Park gauge is a useful tool but the supplied calibration table may as well go in the bin.

Glad to have been of assistance, even if that does mean you are lusting after some DA levers a little more now. You won't realise this but your discussions with Brucey around a year ago into brake cable pull ratios, BB7 disc brakes and NSSLR helped me greatly - now you know why I don't have those 10 speed 105 STIs anymore!

Campag 3*9 certainly did exist - my father had it - though as the front shifting wasn't indexed it is probably the same as 2*9. It felt to me that he also had a lot of trouble with it, but that may have been because he was doing a lot of miles at the time.

The more we discuss this the more i start to think that not only are the ST6510s not the same as DA, they're also more significantly different to the ST6500s of which I'm familiar. Provided they've maintained the good functionality of the ST6500s - and you should be able to check that now - that is probably a good thing.

Agreed that upshift/downshift can be ambiguous: what I meant is that pushing the RH brake lever to the side used to be able to shift up to 3 sprockets at a time. This is no longer always the case with Shimano STIs - the 105 10 speed levers I used for a while varied between 2 and 3 sprockets depending on which sprocket you were starting from and that reviewer reported that ST6510 levers only do 2 sprockets at a time. It's unlikely to be a deal breaker for anybody but as I take my bike off road I do appreciate the fast, large 'downshift' option for when the terrain gets steeper or more boggy unexpectedly. For shifts with the little STI lever: AFAIK this has always been a single sprocket move with Shimano. As you have discovered Campag can do multiple shifts in both directions. While this no bad thing, I can't think of a scenario where it's required to the extent it dictates which brand you choose.

Ultegritis was a chronic but non fatal condition that started with the little plastic name plate making an irritating little rattle as you rode over rough (ie all UK) roads. Unfortunately it would then spread to the main brake lever which would make a much louder noise as it vibrated on our delightful tarmac. The initial symptoms could be cured with a blob of mastic but once the lever started to rattle the only solution was to ride with your hands permanently on the hoods and your fingers resting on the brake lever. Later versions used a screw to attach the name plate; I don't know if there were more fundamental changes to the innards that solved the lever rattling issue.

I followed your link to the ST6510 review and noted that it is (like us on this forum) just the view of one user so make what you will of the 'same mechanicals as DA' comment. It also mentioned that the RH lever is not able to make 3 downshifts in one sweep - which the DA ones can. You may not care but it further suggests that they are not the same levers. That's not to say that they're no good - despite the Ultergritis my ST6500s worked very well, much better than the 10 speed Ultegra and 105 ones that I've tried subsequently.

Not sure if that has been said about this comparison, but if it has I disagree. I had 2 sets of Ultegra ST6500 (Mk 1 Ultegra 9 speed with the clipped on name plate rather than the screwed on one in ST6510) and while they all worked admirably they never felt as positive as the ST7700 Dura Ace levers did. I've always attributed this to the quality of the internals in the DA levers. They also suffered badly from Ultegritis, which whilst a common infection at the time, was never able to mutate into a strain that could infect DA.

While the Ultegra levers have long since been sold on with their respective bikes I still have the DA ones and only last week was looking in to how I can 'downgrade' the 10 speed Ultegra bike I now ride to 9 speed so that I may fit them.

Most people won't be old enough to remember when kids' bikes came with a device to stop the handlebars turning all the way round; but thats whats needed. (Last seen on the Raleigh Twenty, I think)

There was one on the Frog bike I just sold on Ebay on behalf of a friend. A bike which confirmed the earlier comment up thread about good children’s bikes holding their value.

+1 for KMC X chains.

Re the 20 year lifespan - if you subject it to a similar use and/or have the same tolerance of a worn drivetrain then no reason why not. Alternatively if you change the chain more often you could benefit from a more efficient drivetrain and further delay costly and potentially more difficult replacements of rings and sprockets.

Are you sure your existing chainset is 24-34-44? I don't believe they were regular rings on a Shimano chainset in that era, and hence if that is what you have the mech may not have been optimised for that setup anyway.

I have a couple of 559 Ryde Zac 2000 SEs (both with eyelets) and looking back at my notes I have the ERD recorded as 535mm for the rear and 536 for the front. They were bought at different times - initially the rear to re-rim a wheel where the brakes had worn through and later the front to build a hub dynamo wheel. I suspect the 535mm value came from a spec sheet somewhere as I was attempting to replace the split rim using existing spokes. The 536 is more likely to be the value I measured myself.

As both of these values differ from what you have read it looks like you will have to wait and see though, annoying though that is. If it's any consolation I've found them to be great rims.

Edit: having read the other comments on this topic maybe my numbers do fit in - as long as we assume that Ryde are actually quoting a NSD value. I measure with a couple of old spokes which have the nipples glued onto the threads exactly where I’d like the spoke to end up once the wheel is built.

Thank you for these replies on the merits or otherwise of the eyelets - makes sense now so I shall not worry. I had noticed that many DT rims come supplied with washers so in that instance they are presumably recommended but the supplied ones should at least be the optimum shape.

Interesting that Brucey mentioned H+Son as their Hydra (disc) rim was on my shortlist but currently my preference is for the Pacenti Forza offering as that is asymmetric, which makes sense to me. And yet my research had highlighted a past problem with some models of Pacenti rims cracking, though that now seems now to have been resolved also by making them a little heavier.

Any time I’ve needed to get nipples into a rim without double sockets I’ve used Peetee’s approach, because I don’t build that many and am not in a hurry. Having seen the discussion here it might be worth experimenting with some alternatives though.

Last time I built any wheels, quality rims all seemed to still come with eyelets in them. Now I’m looking into a new pair this no longer seems to be the case. Do the nipples gall into the rim as you approach full tension? Should I plan to use washers in the rim to avoid this? And more generally, why did we used to think the eyelets were a good thing but now that no longer seems to be the case?

I built my 725 Croix de Fer in 2013 - size medium - and weighed it before building:
Frame: 2150g
Fork (uncut): 956g

It’s a bit of an enigma as every time I pick it up I think ‘Christ that’s heavy’, and when I ride it I think ‘god I love this bike’. I often wonder about getting an equivalent frame made by a local frame builder in the hope that it would be lighter, but probably never will. Might be time for some new wheels though as I have some XTR hubs not doing anything...