Specific Wheel Build Question

[Swine]

I just upgraded my rear hub, mainly because I can't get a new cup for my cup & cone Shimano in Bolivia. I've built a front wheel, but I'm having trouble figuring out what length spokes to use with my old S-Type wheel and my new Sun Ringle Abbah S.O.S. rear hub.

My last build attempt failed today because one of my replacement spokes ended up being about 3-4 mm too long. Basically I have an assortment of bent, used, and slightly varying lengths of spokes from about 259 mm up to 263 mm. So I scraped the idea of trying to save money and decided to just replace all the spokes.

Here's where the problem comes in... After getting serious about doing this right, and only doing front wheels up till now, I decided to run my new hub dimensions and wheel ERD through multiple spoke calculators, including DT Swiss's. Everyone comes back and says that I should have 270 mm spokes for a 3x pattern (32 spoke count). This doesn't make any sense to me because the 263 mm spoke I had tried to use was too long in the first place; how am I supposed to use 270 mm all around? Just from trial and error today it seems like I should be using 260 all around; but this is 10 mm less than the calculator says. I guess the other problem is I don't even know if I can get 270 mm here in Bolivia; our workshop only stocks up to 264 mm.

Does anyone have any experience with this hub/wheel combo? Or why the calculator could be coming back 10 mm off? I even resorted to measuring everything with a micrometer just to double check all calculations... same thing even with the varying tolerances from the manufacturing of the hub and wheel.

[toast2266]

I don't have access to any spoke calculators that still have the dimensions for an Abbah, but there's no way that for a 26" wheel at 3 cross will need a 270. I think the longest I've ever seen for a rear wheel (assuming you're not using any really weird parts, which you're not) is 264. I would bet that you need around 260 on the non-drive, and 258-259 on the drive (assuming that the abbah is a disc hub).

[Swine]

Thanks toast, that definitely makes me feel better. I think I'm going to get 260's tomorrow morning and see if I can run them all at that length. If I'm not mistaken the Abbah's L-R flange diameter is different so that I can run the same length on both drive and non-drive side. If it doesn't work out I'll cut the drive side down a mil. The S-types are pretty deep and they have a lot of room to play with (which is how I got away with running mixed lengths before, clearly not ideal though).

[toast2266]

Sounds good, although thinking about it a bit more, S-types are pretty deep. I might knock another mil off of those estimates (so maybe try 259ish on the non-drive).

[mntlion]

http://www.bikeschool.com/spokes/index.cgi

if you can find the hub info that might help.