Building a 45 spoke wheel.

[zerodish]

I have drilled 9 additional holes in a large flange hub and built a wheel with it. Photo link below There is a standard engineering practice for this sort of thing developed by the bridge industry. The holes must be 2 hole diameters away from the edge and 3 hole diameters away from each other. So even with a large flange hub we are way beyond what would be allowed on a bridge or an aircraft. This is why radial spoked wheels break the flange. On the other hand it may be possible to drill 50 percent more holes in a large flange hub and have comparable stress to a small flange hub without the additional holes. The additional spokes are radial with an offset equivalent to a 1 cross. They do touch the other spokes so the offset is 2 mm less than the other inside spokes. This allows me to calculate the strength gain. The tension of the left hand spokes went from .66 times the tension of the right hand spokes to .92 times after retruing the wheel. This indicates the amount of weight the wheel can support before the bottom spoke goes to 0 tension is 40 percent greater. The amount of force the wheel can withstand applied from the side before the wheel buckles on the gear side is also increased by 40 percent. I was not sure this pattern would work. You can't put a spoke on the rim seam so it has to be offset by 1 spoke. This put a bit of shear stress on the seam where it is always harder to true the wheel. However it went together well. Testing will continue until failure or I wear out the rim around 10000 miles. https://flic.kr/p/TLkrge

[walks.in2.trees]

The link doesn't seem to work.
 if you use the Tapatalk app, you can place images inline within the editor and it automatically generates an outside link on the tapatalk server, so you don't need to mess with trying to upload photos to outside services to post images on forums

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[zerodish]

Probably just a cosmic ray I corrected the original post  and also there is this the failed first attempt. https://flic.kr/p/TLnB5t

[zerodish]

Now that I'm running my wheel I am building a second one using my old hub. It has 3 cross spokes and it turns out there is room to put the radial spokes on the outside of the flange. This should give you even tension on all of the crossed spokes with the radial spokes slightly under tensioned. Insert a 3mm Allen wrench where you plan to drill the holes if it clears the cogs the spokes should clear.

[zerodish]

After 2 years there have been no failures of the hubs. I have broken several spokes with an R on the heads however I believe these are just bad spokes. Each of the two hubs has accumulated 4000 miles with around 165 pounds weight on the rear wheel. For more weird ideas check my flickr account under zerodish.

[driftlessregion]

Interesting but you didn't say what the purpose of this experiment is.

[zerodish]

Santana and my self came up with formulas to calculate wheel strength based on the amount of dish these wheels have. Dish is a very old word used on wagon wheels that means the rim is not centered over the hub. Engels Coach Shop is still building these wheels. Dish was designed into these wheels though I can't find out why. The strongest wheels have zerodish. The next strongest wheels have equal spoke tension achieved by using different gauge spokes or by using more spokes on one side. The worlds greatest tourist Ian Hibell said you must use components you can get parts for. He started out with 32 spokes front and 40 spokes rear with Campagnolo hubs. Eventually 40 spoke rims became impossible to find. My 45 spoke wheels are as strong as a 54 spoke wheel of equal dish. They can be made from a standard 36 spoke wheel with a large flange hub. You can buy these wheels any where and modify them on the road which I have proved can be done. Once 48 spoke wheels become more common I will switch.