Wheel Fanatyk spline nipples bring back the unfinished work of the Spline Drive design from a decade or more ago with their new alloy offering.
The benefit? Better interfaces with the truing tool mean less stripping when fixing or building a wheel. They’re also lighter because there’s less material than the standard square design. Yet Wheel Fanatyk founder Ric Hjertberg says they’re so strong that if you use a thread lock on it and keep tightening, you’ll break the spoke before you break the nipple.
At retail, they’ll be about $0.60 each when factored into a wheel build. Weight is about 0.31g per nipple, versus 0.35g for a square alloy nipple. But brass nipples are about 1g each, so the real upgrade is getting all the durability and strength of the brass but much less rotational mass on a complete wheelset.
Available now in green, silver, black, blue, purple, gold, red and blue. They also have the splined wrench to fit them.
Not shown, they also have a new foot pedal for their digital tension meter that quickly captures each spoke’s tension and records it so you don’t have to stop after each one and wrote down the measurement, which can speed up building considerably.
