Originally Posted by
adamrice
This is
an archive of a lot of Jobst Brandt's usenet debates. I don't see any place where he lays out directly why butted spokes (he refers to them as "swaged spokes") are better or worse, but he does address them in a couple of posts
here and
here. At various points, he seems to say that swaged spokes are better than straight-gauge spokes, but he also seems to be saying (and I hate to put words in his mouth) that spoke metallurgy has gotten so good that it doesn't matter.
Classic bit from his book: "It appears that the better spokes now available would have made the discovery of many of the concepts in this book more difficult for lack of failure data. I am grateful in retrospect for the poor durability of earlier spokes. They operated so near their limit that durability was significantly altered by the techniques that I have outlined."