I received a Novatec front hub and am checking the dimensions. I noticed that the spoke holes aren't exactly radially centered to the hub flange. Some holes are around -0.25mm closer and some are +0.25mm further away from the center. Will this be acceptable, and are there any real practical problems with having holes with this small amount of misalignment?
I saw an article from a bike site of a Novatec factory tour. It seems they cold press raw bars into the general shape of the hub, then a CNC lathe cuts the shape down to it's final and more precise form. The article did not show how they drilled the holes, but if the holes were drilled by the same CNC lathe while the hub was still mounted inside the machine, then the holes should be fairly accurately centered. However, if they took the hub out of the lathe machine and put it into a nomral x-y-z cnc milling machine, I would expect a tolerance of +/- 0.1mm due to reclamping of the hub into a different jig. But a larger tolerance of +/- 0.25mm seems to show a less precise workflow.
Also, the design of the end caps leaves a large gap between the cap and the hub body. It invites large particles to fall into the gap.
Also, the hub body seems to have been designed for the cartridge bearings to be flush against the outside surface of the hub. However, the bearing on one side is +0.15mm outside the hub body, while the other bearing is -0.15mm recessed into the hub. this doesn't make much of a practical difference, since spoke tension will easily fix a small amount of wheel dishing, but it shows what kind of machining precision they're using. You can almost see the in the photo below, the bearing coming out past the surface of the hub body. This makes the gap to the end cap +0.3mm larger than the gap at the other side of the hub.
