Hi all, I have a race coming up soon (the Gulf Coast Triathlon 1/2 IM distance on May 8th) and just bought a Velocity Spartacus front wheel to race with. This replaces a 10 year old Campy 36 hole that I have been racing on. When I spin them by hand, the old campy spins for about 5 minutes, but the new one spins for less than a minute. It is nice and smooth but the seals are pretty tight still. I have about 2.5 weeks before the race, and only have about 80-120 miles scheduled in my taper.
The big question is…how many miles should it take for the seals to be smooth and loose…am I better off using the campy rim? I should save about 1/3lb in aero drag but I don’t want to give a lot of that back in bearing drag just because the rims are new. I guess I could calculate the bearing drag in lbs if I knew the moment of inertia of the wheel…any suggestions or recommendations would be great!!!
BTW-my target is 20-20.5mph on the bike and 8-8:30 pace on the run. I hope to be 5:00 to 5:30 overall.
Totally a guess without any way of actually knowing: Run the Velocity between now and then, and don’t test it with your spin test any more…you don’t really want to know if it is still tighter than your old Campy. I assume you have the 20 spoke Velocity…the decreased spoke count with the slightly deeper rim will be worth more than the tiny amount of friction that may be in the seals/bearings.
Have a great race! I hope you break 5 hrs!
Thanks for the advice, but I am unfortunately too obsessive to wing it like I’d like to.
Well being the mechie that I am, I couldn’t just NOT figure out the actual forces involved. Based on estimating the inertia of the wheels (from AnalyticCycling.com’s chart) The drag force on the old bearings are about 0.03lb, and on the new rim about 0.18lb. Given the extra 0.15lb of bearing drag right now it’s close to a break-even…0.05 lb of total drag improvement is only worth about 0.15mph, so I gotta hope that they break in a bunch in 100 miles!!!
I got the 16 spoke ones since I am pretty lightweight and ride on mostly good roads. I had better be close to 5 hours if I want to beat my brother. 
How does the number of spokes figure in to the equation…and the deeper rim section?
FWIW, I had a wheel that seemed slow, and the manufacturer sent me a new hub that I installed…it did perform the “hand spin” test better…but, no difference on the road. Another time, I had a Spinergy wheel that would drag so much the pedals would walk forward when I pushed the bike while walking beside it…THAT is a lot of drag. Spinergy pulled a flourescent blue seal out of the hub to relieve the drag…guess what…I couldn’t tell one bit of difference in the speed of the wheel in real life.
Like I said, don’t sweat it…the few spokes and deeper rim will outweigh a little seal drag. I think 
Now, go out and beat your brother, then try and convince him you could have done even better if your wheel wasn’t dragging!
What matters is the freedom of spin under load, not unloaded. I don’t think that the two are necessarily the related. Any engineers out there?
Well, I’m a mechie engineer, but I don’t deal with bearings at all, so I can’t say for certain on the loaded conditions. I do know that the rolling resistance does change with the load on the bearing, but I guess for a similar construction of bearing (ball vs needle etc) the proportional change in drag should be the same. However, the seal drag should be fairly consistent regardless of vertical load…so if the new bearings are dominated by seal drag then they shouldn’t change as much when I put 50-70lb on them. It’s too late for complex thought…lol!
I oops’d on my calculations, the actual numbers are 0.02lb for the old rims and 0.12lb for the new rim…not quite as bad as I thought.
Aha! Apparently either it just managed to turn the corner around 140 miles, or there was some grit or something stuck in the seals, because suddenly the wheel spins free and clear. Now it spins to 6 mins and 45 secs, for a drag of roughly 0.01lb no-load. Weeeeeeeeee!
Thanks for all the responses, hopefully the wheel stays like this!
I still say you should go whip your brother in the race and tell him you did it on a slow-bearing wheel…