Originally Posted by
Hoopdriver
I've used DT, Wheelsmith, Alpine, Sapim, and a few others. No significant difference that I can detect. More important that you use enough of them (I'm not a fan of low spoke count wheels).
Beefy elbows make sense; however since all of my spoke breakages were at the nipple, I wonder if the WF blogger is relying on engineering advantage instead of real life benefit. I have a set of wheels that were built with 1.8-1.5-1.8 DB spokes and I have to admit that I would have liked for the elbows to fit a bit better in the flange holes. Nevertheless, these wheels (36 spokes in 4 cross lacing) are close to 50 years old and holding up well.
Eric Hjertberg has lots of real life experience. He was the founder of Wheelsmith. Wheel Fanatyk is more than just a blog as well. And “engineering” doesn’t necessarily mean just “book learnin’”.
I link to that article because it articulates what I have found in using these spokes for over 20 years. I’ve been touting the benefits of triple butted spokes for a long time before that article came out so rather than writing it all out again, I just link to the article. But, my experience has been identical to what he writes. Spokes with stronger heads are more durable than a double butted spoke.
Pillar actually has measured the differences and published the results. You’ll need to look at each of the different spokes on their product page, they give the breaking strength of the spokes. There are slight differences between Pillar and DT Alpine III in terms of dimensions but if you look at the charts for the Pillar spoke with 2.3mm heads (like the Alpine), they break at 3900 newtons compared to about 2900 N for the 2.0mm double butted spoke. The strength difference is quite obvious.
I cannot recall having had a single failure of one of my wheels at the spoke. I’ve broken some spokes at the nipple on old wheels at my local co-op but those are usual quite corroded.