Bill I can see the great effort put into these videos, but I see the 360° contact claim repeatedly. Removing or updating videos is a good idea, everyone makes mistakes. pon this video I am suprised to see the claims about nipple shapes. I know of no nipples with a flat bottom as claimed here even in different scale. claims of greater strength of the rim with wahsers seems anecdotal at best. Having done 1000's of pull tests on rims with every washer type and eyelete type on every brand of rims. The data from these tests do not support assertions made by spoke makers regarding washers. As a simple note, soft brass or 1xxx,3xxx aluminum washers would be far better than these horrible steel washers. The softer copper or aluminum alloys will yield and conform to the hyperbolic parabaloid form of the spoke bed and the shape of both conical and spherical nipple heads. Such wahsers will certainly offer increased rim life, especially in instances where poor design or alloy selection otheriwise makes the rims quite short lived.
Josh I agree with you on the profile of the nipples. It is not clear to me that Sapim Polyax design is much different from other manufacturers. The Polyax nipple is their standard nipple so they just added a trademarked name to there standard nipple. I disagree that aluminum washers would be better than a properly fitting stainless steel washer. Aluminum-aluminum interface is more likely to gall than a aluminum-stainless interface. I have never seen aluminum nipple washers probably for the galling reason. Nipple washers have been around for a long time, but were replaced by eyeleted rims which was thought to be a better solution to increase rim durability. Because of this, nipple washers were largely forgotten. It seems that nowadays, even expensive rims do not use eyelets, so nipple washers are gaining more interest as a way of increasing rim durability.
Ob the rim or on the hub flange? On the hub flange you could (!) use a mallet to set the spoke heads/j-bends. Will not work on straight pulled spokes obviously ;-).
