What if your wheel collapsed?

 Back around 1980, a once-promising racer in the Maryland scene supposedly had lost a lot of his nerve when his low spoke count front wheel folded up in a sprint, sending him down from 30 to zero in the length of his own body. For you metric users, that's 48 to zero in less than two meters. When the front wheel disappears, the glide path is pretty abrupt.

Back then, low spoke count could mean 28, or maybe 24, and lightweight spokes were called "piano wires." I wasn't around before this rider had that crash, so I never knew him at his best. He was still plenty strong and skillful, but pretty good is not good enough for national-level competition. In a strong district, it isn't even good enough for regional prominence. You have to be willing to ride to die. On top of that, you need the genetics and the training to have the motor just to stay with a field of top riders. Anything that makes you the least bit hesitant is going to cripple you.

Nasty crashes can happen to anyone, for a wide variety of reasons. Equipment failure is not limited to high performance equipment built to thin margins of safety. On the plus side, incipient equipment failures can be detected by inspecting a bike regularly. Sometimes these failures make themselves obvious, as with previous cases of spontaneous spoke or nipple failure I've reported here.

The worst case scenario is that someone hops on their recreational bike that's been sitting in storage and pedals away without noticing that a couple of spokes have failed, and manages to get up to a moderate speed -- down a hill for instance -- before the wheel folds up. Of the two, a rear wheel is only slightly preferable, since it's not going to lead directly to a face plant. You'll still hit the ground abruptly and hard. Fortunately, most of the time, other issues will prompt a person to bring their bike in for a check up before they go out, or will stop them early in their shakedown cruise, as rusted chain links or some other drive train interference make the bike too hard to ride.

One case of spoke failure this summer showed up on a Schwinn recreational bike with an internally-geared hub. It had a couple of broken spokes. This can happen in storage if something gets shoved into the bike, or it can happen when several bikes are stacked on a rack on a car, or in a crowded parking situation, or a crash.

Closer examination revealed that the spokes had simply come apart. Every spoke in the wheel was banded with rings of rust that had eaten most of the way through them, except for the ones that had already disintegrated.

If you look closely, you can see a piece of spoke at an angle, impersonating a normal bend. You could crumble these spokes in your hand, into little fragments. They had no tensile strength at all.

With the current problems getting parts, my only choice was to respoke the wheel with a different cross pattern to match the lengths of spokes available. It went from three-cross to four-cross, which will just provide a cushier ride. I built my first touring wheels four-cross because it was supposed to be better for long hauls at moderate speeds, with a load. It was all right. I've had to depart from basic three-cross on other occasions as well. It's all legit. I generally don't go below three-cross except by customer request.

Stripped down, the hub felt like something you could use to train for the shot put. It weighs 4 1/2 pounds.

My wife, who competed in the shot put as part of her track and field career in school, informed me that the women's shot is almost nine pounds, and the men's is 16. But we could have a "hub put" category added to the Huffy Toss if we ever have a bike shop field day. Regulation weight could be whatever we say. This hub was still a hefty handful. Holding it up to load the spokes, my arm started to get pumped.

Within a day or two, another wheel job came in and I reflexively wrote it up for respoking, even though we could have replaced the wheel with a complete pre-built wheel. This is another example of how cheap labor has led to replacing rather than rebuilding something because parts and labor cost more than a new unit of low to modest quality.  In the wheel department, this is nothing new. My friend in Florida worked as a contract wheel builder in the 1970s, paid by the piece. I don't know if any US supplier uses American workers for that sort of thing anymore. She also wasn't trying to support herself on the income. It was supplemental in a variety of gig jobs, in a duo with her talented and enterprising husband before he finished his aircraft mechanic certifications.

The wheel I built was better than mass-produced, and it saved a complete wheel for someone who might need it more. It's good to stay in practice. I'd observed early in the season that people don't have much use for wheel builders anymore, and promptly started getting wheel repairs and complete builds.

A conventional build doesn't take too long, which might make it seem cheap and easy, but you do need to know how to make it efficient as well as quick. Proper tensioning takes most of the building and truing time. That's the part that takes experience. It's easy to get into trouble by rushing the tensioning phase. 

Novice builders will make two common mistakes: go for lateral trueness before roundness, and stop with too little tension once the wheel is as close to perfectly true as they can get it. After they've had a few of their creations develop the wobblies because of inadequate tension, they might move on to the intermediate mistake of too much tension. You can buy a tensiometer to check whether tension is sufficient and even, but after a while you will develop a feel for it by squeezing and by how the spoke wrench feels when you turn it. Check your calibration with the tensiometer occasionally.

A big part of the cost of custom wheel building is that we only get parts at wholesale, whereas most mass-production builders get a price that is at least one tier lower, and probably even better than that. They can take a margin on parts and labor that compensates them well, and still undercut us for the same parts on the same build pattern. When we have unrestricted access to supplies, we will often spec a pre-built wheel that matches what we would have done anyway. Reputable production suppliers have become pretty good at spitting out consistently acceptable wheels. And if you want something tweaky and modern, super light and fashionable, you will have to buy complete wheels. If you want something a little more tailored, based on rim width or a preferred brand, then you have to find someone to put that together for you.

Spring Avalanche

Just as March looked like April again this year, so did the repair load go from zero to backlogged in a matter of days.

With only 1.3 mechanics on duty most days, we get buried more easily than we did in the boom times of the 1990s, but even back then the amount of repair work this early in the season would have been remarkable.

I did manage to finish the crash repairs on that Pedego.

The battery case takes a long time to install, because it is held together with eight little Phillips head screws that are mostly inaccessible. Inaccessibility is no excuse, however, so you have to use several different screwdrivers and contort your wrist to coax the fastenings down to seat fully. This was after rewiring the damn thing. Sliding the battery into the case was an appropriately satisfying insertion. Bit of an anticlimax, really.

The fun had just begun there, though. Pedego had changed their wiring harness (of course) since the bikes were built, so the new light and control unit had to include the adapted fittings for the old harness. Even the wire from the brake levers, that cuts the motor when the brakes are applied, had the connectors reversed. Most of the work was not complicated. It just took time to collect all the necessary little bits, from Pedego, from the hardware store, and from the crash-damaged parts that still had useful wiring.

Mixed in with the earliest arrivals was a Motobecane from the 1980s with a classic corncob freewheel.

Back when 52-13 was considered a big gear, and we only had six in the back, the 13-18 was the mark of the racer. Anyone old enough to have a freewheel like that now is not pushing a 42-18 up the hills of the White Mountains anymore. Converting this bike to lower gears required not just a wider-range freewheel, but also a derailleur that could handle the cog size and chain wrap. We're still waiting for the crankset to convert the front end to 110 compact. Adaptable old bikes can have new lives. They'll still be rolling along when the exoskeletons of the most recent marvels are already lying cracked and discarded, the batteries in their shifters dead, hydraulic fluid and tire sealant seeping into the ground.

I do like the 1890s leather on 21st Century carbon fiber on this Trek road bike:

Carbon fiber the bike may be, but it's such a relic that the cables are actually outside the frame! The poor bastard riding it is getting by with only ten speeds in the cassette and has this weird device that moves the chain between two chainrings on the crank. Old people have weird stuff. They say things like, "By cracky!" and "Jehosaphat!" too. And they do that weird little jig with their elbows out when they're excited. This guy still has all his own teeth, though. I can say things like this because I'm pretty sure I'm older than he is.

A couple of posts ago I said that only a rare old codger wanted me to build a wheel anymore. Then two wheel jobs came in. One of them was for the Trek above. The 24-spoke Easton rear wheel had a cracked rim. No rims were available, but we could get a 28-spoke hub and rim to build him a complete new wheel. I'm not a fan of low spoke count wheels, but they do go together more quickly.

                                                                   Hub porn

The All City hub is very nice for the price. I thought about stockpiling one or two for future wheels of my own.

The other wheel project used hub, rim, and spokes provided by the customer. I couldn't figure out why the wheel had been completely disassembled in the first place. The spokes were bundled and labeled right and left side for the disc hub, but even though they were supposedly the correct lengths the wheel was difficult to tension evenly. The rim had taken a couple of hard shots. Also, the customer had told me it was two-cross, but it turned out to have been three. It's easy to overlook that first cross down by the hub flange.

In the repair mystery department, a bike this week was completely missing the return spring assembly on one brake arm.

It wasn't a model with plastic parts that could break easily and allow the spring to fall out. There was no sign that the brake arm had been removed. I had nothing in the salvage bin to replace just the missing pieces, so we had to install a complete brake set. This tends to happen on repairs where the customer has set low financial limits. We agree to a minimal repair, trying to ignore anything off the script, and then find something we can't let go. Fortunately, the customer accepted the necessity.

Salvaged parts featured prominently for another repair. A road bike turned out to need a cassette after a new chain did not play nicely with the original gear cluster. The bike has nine-speed brifters, from back when that was respectably middle class. The cassette was a 12-25. We can't get one. We had an 11-28. The derailleur theoretically could be coaxed to handle the 28, but couldn't handle the chain wrap. I went to the cog farm to piece together just the cogs on which the chain had skipped. In the process I discovered the intact low-gear section -- 17 through 25 -- of the exact cassette we needed.

Save old cogs. Most of the time, a cassette is not completely chewed. Even if the chain skips on more than just the cog with the fewest teeth, others less used in the cluster may have lots of useful life left in them.

Finally, I was looking for videos on a repair procedure on a smokeless moped. At the end of the YouTube video, the montage of stills for "videos I might like" included this excellent accidental pairing:

Remember those words and heed them always.

Nipple Alert

The tune up was going smoothly. Too smoothly. The owner of the bike is a big guy who rides a lot. How was I breezing through this toward my fast-approaching deadline? I'll just pop these wheels in the truing stand, even though they look pretty good.

I'd noted that whoever built the wheels had used alloy nipples. Don't get me started on alloy nipples. I've seen a lot of them sheared off over the years. But I began to wonder if alloy nipples might be the safety valve to take some of the strain off of heat-treated rims that fatigue and crack.

In the stand, the rear wheel looked pretty straight, but I saw a tiny waver I could reduce to nothing. I set the spoke wrench on the flats of the nipple and barely shifted my fingers. The nipple crumbled to powder. It took no force at all.

On an older wheel I check for cracks in the rims. On eyeleted rims I look for loose eyelets. So when I surveyed the wheels for more deterioration I marked bad nipples with red tape on the spoke and bad eyelets with a bit of tape on the rim.

I can't say for sure how close the wheels were to catastrophic failure, since the spokes still held even after the nipples had crumbled under exploratory pressure, but they weren't being ridden over rough roads by a large guy right then, either.

Particularly disturbing was the number of bad nipples in the front wheel. If eight spokes decided to let go at the same time in a front wheel I think you'd stop pretty abruptly. And that's in a conventional wheel with 36 spokes. Do the math. Reduce the number of spokes, correspondingly increasing the load on each one and then subtract a bunch all at once. A rider I know lost ONE spoke in a Mavic wheel on a fast descent and it almost locked up the wheel completely. He was able to bring the bike to a controlled stop, but it was a scary few seconds.

So, my weight-conscious friends, examine your wheels very critically if you have had them a few years. These wheels had a lot of miles, so fatigue is not unreasonable, but if no one had checked they might have announced their retirement at a surprise party they threw for themselves.

This never happens

Anaerobic Spoke Failure?

Another spoke broke on my commute this morning. At the start of commuting season a spoke failed in exactly the same way, breaking at the threads in the nipple, not at the elbow in the hub flange.

As a wheel builder I take spoke breakage personally. I can't do anything about the fatigue failure of heat treated rims or the eventual fatigue failure of really elderly spokes, but spoke quality has improved so much in recent years that reputable builders are actually reusing them when replacing rims. Such a thing was never done a couple of decades ago.

The type of failure made me wonder if the spokes were a tad too short, creating a stress riser in the threaded portion. The rim depth of the Sun CR 18 does not allow for more than a millimeter more length. Then I remembered that stainless steel is prone to anaerobic corrosion in places where moisture can get in and air is excluded. It's a peculiar problem with stainless that can have a serious impact in marine applications.

In areas where roads are salted, the water around spoke nipples can be a tad on the briny side as well, adding electrolytic components to the possible mix. But anaerobic corrosion does not require saltiness.

I don't know for sure whether the spoke failures I suffered stemmed from anaerobic corrosion. Symptomatically it seems quite possible. I'm completely respoking the wheel today so I don't get caught doing the bent-rim samba down the road again.

Driven to Distraction

My last ride was November 23. It seems longer ago than that.

We went to visit my wife's foodie relatives in Vermont for Thanksgiving. That involved a lot of fine food and drink and no major exertion at all. I'm not complaining. They don't trust us with the really good wine, but they didn't hold back on a highly satisfactory single malt scotch. The turkey was locally raised and very fresh. Their palates wouldn't let them serve utter swill for table wine, even though they didn't present the pride of their cellars.

Speaking of utter swill, I've decided to order the SRAM iLight generator hub. Using the wine analogy, in order to discover for yourself that great $2 bottle, you risk drinking a lot of swill. The only information I've been able to dig up on the iLight has indicated it might be a really good value. The only way to know for sure is to build up a wheel and put it to the test.

Other factors than my aversion to swallowing the Shimano Kool Aid went into this decision. Of the three major contenders for my hub dollar, Schmidt, Shimano and SRAM, only Schmidt and SRAM offered a rim-brake hub with 36 holes. Overkill? Perhaps. But what if I move the rig to a loaded tourer? It might still be overkill, given that front wheels just seem to go forever. I still want to support the vanishing 36-hole species.

I got additional support for the beefier wheel when I stepped onto the scale at my doctor's office yesterday and faced the effects of the decadent living in Vermont and my own reduced riding and depressive snacking. Even though I don't get caught up in a lot of holiday madness, I seem to lose my whole routine during the time between mid November and the beginning of January. It must be endemic to the winter solstice. If I lived on a tropical island with no calendar, I wonder if I would be able to float along in a steady routine without these unrequested fluctuations.

I actually enjoy a little hibernation. It's unnatural to be buffed and aggressive all year. Nothing like the end of November and most of December to provoke quiet contemplation. And comfort eating.

I've been on the rollers a couple of times. No doubt I'll figure out what to do as the winter evolves. If the roads stay clear enough I'll get out on the faithful fixed gear as well.

More Progress on the Singer

This is the stuff. Cal found some at Sanel Auto Parts.

Here is what it does. The directions on the package say to avoid contact with the skin, but at $12 a tube I would apply the stuff with my tongue sooner than waste any of it on a rag. I did start using a rag, but only after I had spread polish with my fingers. Once a small section of the rag was well charged with polish I used it to spread subsequent applications.

A hubcupine!

Commencing to hook up the spokes.

Wheel builder style: hub label visible through the valve hole. All labels read to the right.

The TA crank, après Simichrome.

The bike is all in pieces at the moment, but those parts are nearly ready to merge back into a whole machine.

My wife's got a nice-looking pair

Except for one or two details, the cellist's bikes on the Cross Check platform are complete. The red one is set up as a rainy-day fixed gear. The Traveler's Check has her multi-gear configuration. The Planet Bike Cascadia fenders will fit either bike in case we set up for a longer tour some time.

The fixed gear sports a 36-spoke rear wheel with flip-flop hub, awaiting a half link to set the chain so both sides are usable. I could have sworn I had a 3/32" half link in my stash. Can't find it now, though.

On the front is the 32-spoke wheel that came with her Cross Check Complete. I put the new 36-spoke front wheel I just built on the bike more likely to carry a load. I have to order some parts to make her a 36-spoke 9-speed rear. I couldn't believe QBP listed no 36-hole DT hubs. The only 36-hole rear hubs in any of three supplier catalogs I checked were Shimano. I'll have to choke down my objection to non-serviceable freehubs for the sake of a spokier wheel for loaded touring. What the hell is DT thinking? They had a 36 last year. I've put a Shi'no 105 on the list to order. I have a couple of days to search a little more.

Tooling Up

After many years of bitching and improvising, I just ordered a compressor and a grinder. The relatively major purchase inspires me to reflect on how my workshop has grown over the years.

When I finally started to pay close attention to bicycles in 1975, I realized this was a vehicle anyone could maintain with ease, even when living in a small apartment. A few special tools were required, but they were relatively cheap and would pay for themselves many times over as I did my own repairs at my own convenience.

I don't remember the exact order of purchase, but I bet cone wrenches came high on the list. Hub overhauls and adjustments are simple procedures. I needed a freewheel tool to remove whatever type of freewheel I was running at the time.

Somewhere in there I got a fixed-cup and lock ring spanner, and a 32mm and pin spanner so I could service the bottom bracket and headset. Later I got a second 32mm, with a 15mm pedal wrench on the other end. I'd gotten a crank puller with my first alloy cotterless crank. You got a lot of goodies with a component purchase back then. Later I got the Park universal one.

Early on, I recognized the value of the "fourth hand" cable tensioner. I'd bought a third hand to hold the brake pads against the rim, but found myself using it less and less once I could manipulate everything through cable tension. I use it from time to time when the fourth hand doesn't quite apply, so it still earns a place on the pegboard.

I would post pics of my workshop arrangement if I was proud of it. It's barely a step above chaos, however. With the compressor and grinder I will shift a number of operations out to the detached garage to keep the noise and dust level lower in the house. The next priority will be to insulate said garage so I can work there in the winter and so things don't freeze solid. Alternatively, since funds are perennially tight, I might just bring the compressor into the crawl space and mothball it for the winter. At 20 below zero my garage is 20 below zero until I institute some climate control. But that problem is months away.

For many years my tool purchases slowly filled larger and larger tool boxes. Now I have two with drawers, one a 2-drawer, the other a 3-drawer, plus about a dozen drawers in a weird gray cabinet that came off a trash pile 20 years and five or six dwellings ago. Those drawers are about 10 inches wide and perhaps a foot long, and about three or four inches deep. Half of them are full of small parts like chains, cogs, freewheels, half-eaten headsets, cup-and-cone bottom brackets, miscellaneous derailleurs and so forth.

In addition to the bike-specific tools I have the basic mechanic's outlay, circa 1974, suggested by my far more mechanically-inclined brother. He spent many years driving Model A Fords all over the eastern half of the country, and could rebuild anything, anywhere, on those simple machines. In the mid-1970s, even what passed for modern cars would yield their secrets to ordinary hand tools much of the time. So I had basic metric and English socket sets, assorted screwdrivers, pliers, box-open spanners, hacksaw, and, once I had the Triumph Spitfire, the indispensable CIRCLIP PLIERS. With a 9/16 box-open wrench, a medium screwdriver and a set of circlip pliers you could probably tear down and rebuild the entire car. Oh yes, and let's not forget the ball-peen hammer, vise grips and other implements of destruction.

Spoke wrenches came on the scene within a couple of years. Wheelbuilding is the last mystery short of torch work. Once you can do that you are completely independent until the bike industry finally manages to quit making and supporting normal crap and fences us off from self-sufficiency forever. But with all the product out there based on tried and true methods, I don't see that happening soon, if ever. Only the speed freaks who have to have eggshell frames and tweaky, weird wheels will have to haunt their dealers, with hollow eyes and grasping fingers. "You gotta hook me up, man! My bike has started to feel HEAVY to me! You don't unnerstan'!"

My heart goes out to you poor bastards. Get some help, okay?

As the spoke wrench goes, so goes the truing stand. Shell out for a decent one and treat it right.

I did cough up for the big-boy professional shop-type work stand. Not everyone can do that, but get as close as you can. It might be better to buy the shop-type arm that bolts to your bench than to get a folding stand with a lesser clamp. Use the big-dog, iron-base shop stand as your standard and work from there.

At the other end of the work stand scale, you can hang your bike from a cord tied to a nail driven into the top of a doorway to perform many adjustments. You can't apply a lot of torque, as when setting a fixed cup in an old-style BB or seating a cartridge-type BB, but you can pop a wheel out, and adjust gears and brakes. I did that for decades.

Before I had a headset press I knocked cups into the frame with a block of wood and a hammer. Bear in mind the damage you could do with a ricochet.

After decades in the bike business I have acquired most of the heavy tools for basic handling of steel frames. I have the BB reamer-facer, the taps to chase BB threads, head tube reamer-facer, crown race setters, some tubing tweakers for various applications and I still have a shopping list. Torch work I have yet to master.

I have no illusions about becoming a master frame builder, or even a minor one. My torch aspirations extend to minor repairs like dropout replacement and braze-on installation on the rare frame these days that might not have every imaginable nubbin on it. As such it has not been as high a priority as some other lines of endeavor outside of cycling. I like cycling to support my life, not be my life. The extent of my tools is probably overkill for mere independent maintenance, but not by much. I've found occasion to use just about everything at least once. And I do pick up side jobs from time to time.

My addiction to the QBP account keeps me chained to the shop. That and the other wholesale sources are my pipeline to fresh parts when other sources like scavenging won't suffice. But with a full arsenal of tools I could tackle the parts issue by other means if I lost access to the easy ones. Knowledge is freedom.

Advice

Buy a steel frame. Shift in friction. Use toe clips. Try a fixed gear. Ride conventionally-spoked wheels. Keep it simple.

Cafiend out.

Last Thoughts on Wheel Failure

It could be a form of what happened with Telemark boots and bindings. With old leather boots, they would get all broken down and soft. Then boot makers came out with burly plastic boots. At that point, boots held up well, but people started ripping bindings out of skis. So then we went to beefier screws. So then binding toepieces started cracking. And so on. Each improvement pushed the weakness of another component.

Maybe strong spokes that are more reluctant to break pass on stress to rims already potentially compromised by anodizing and heat treating processes. I NEVER break spokes, but I'm a rim killer. I guess miles of trouble-free riding is some compensation, compared to the annoyance of constantly breaking spokes, but it seems like there was a time when you could get a wheel to last without breaking either one.

On a couple of fixed gear wheels built with Weinmann concaves, I literally rode the races right out of the hubs without breaking a spoke or a rim. That included brakeless kickback stops and plenty of rough roads. It gets hard to keep track of all the substitutions as parts wear out or get damaged, but I know I've laced at least one replacement hub into a Weinmann concave, and may have done it twice. I've only ever replaced a concave due to crash damage. And that was just for aesthetics because I didn't want to keep riding what I'd bashed and tweaked back to acceptable straightness for the brakeless rear of a fixed gear. Sheer indulgence. I did ride it for several years, six or more, before changing it out.

My big weakness is that I can't really stand to ride a crappy bike. Even my beaters have character and become friends.

Dead round, dead straight and dead

Just in case spoke tension was a factor, I threw the road bike's rear wheel into the stand so I could knock about three-eighths of a turn off all the nips. Too late! Every drive side spoke hole has started to crack.

The wheel is still round and true. I had no idea it was starting to fail until I took a close look. Too bad I didn't look before Friday when I fired off another order for a rim. Maybe I should just stock up.

This should get my whole fleet caught up. I have no more rear wheels in regular service.

This string of gear failures is my punishment for buying the Travelers Check, a bike I did not need. Hell, now that the airlines will be charging for every checked bag, what's the point? And how likely am I to really do any traveling? When the S and S coupling instructions say to cover the couplings in wet conditions, there goes the idea of using the bike for the normal fixed gear niche. Guess I should have done more research and bought a normal Cross Check frame. I could transfer the multi-gear setup to the new Cross Check to take advantage of the improvements since 2000 and make the old green machine into the new fixie.

Yeah. No. I still like the idea of the TC. And a glance at the S and S website makes me think a coupled steel frame might actually be better than a traditional one in wet conditions, because you can open it up and blow-dry it.

I think I'm through with Sun rims for a while. This latest cracker is another ME14A. I've had at least one of those fail on a customer's wheel, plus the 0 Degree XC that just died on my Cross Check. It's Velocity's turn now. Got me a Razor on order. And I guess I should quit pounding 32-spoke road wheels down dirt roads under my porcine bulk. I weigh 10 pounds more than I did when I was racing, and it isn't going away. I like to blame cross-country skiing and kayaking for it, but sour cream coffee cake muffins and upper middle class beer contribute a lot.

I felt okay until I read a guy's forum post in a thread about rim failures and he described himself as "stout" at 165 pounds. Shut up, you anorexic #^%, unless you're five feet tall and 165.

The worst part is finding each problem just after I'd ordered similar parts to take care of the previous problem. I should have inspected the fleet back in April so I could make one big order and have everything ready for the season.

Wheel Guru Says:

"First of all, try decaf :) It isn't you. Since they started heat-treating rims, they have become very brittle and prone to cracking. Most of the ones I see cracked are Mavics, but that may be because they are more common. Heat treating is a VERY precise process- the machinist's handbook devotes chapters to it- if anything in the process is not perfect the alloy will assume characteristics that may be undesirable. Sometimes it is intergranular corrosion and sometimes it may be over brittle. Heat treating is about making the molecules do what you want them to do and some days they just want to p---s you off. The rear wheels crack more often because they take more strain. Simple. I bet if the companies could track cracked rims, they would find out they were in the same batches of heat treatment. Corroded wing spars recently found on 1946 aircraft were traced to a bad batch of heat treat in 1945. I am glad your Quartz hub is still working, I had really bad luck with a couple a few years back and swore off them. Relax, it is not your wheelbuilding. Blame the lack of spokes and glass-like rims."

She also said she's been invited to an estate clearance of sorts.

"The last time I did that I came home with two Paramount track tandems, a Lejeune track bike and a van load of TA cranks and Simplex derailleurs."

I love her garage.

My Wheels Never Taco

I rode another rim into the ground yesterday. It's become a familiar scenario. I notice that the bike feels wobbly, I glance down and see that the rear rim has developed a waggle. Close inspection reveals cracks in the rim.

On the way to that final shimmy into the junkyard (or recycling bin), the wheels run round and true with little or no intervention after I build them. But the cracking bothers me.

I'm not one of those who believes in ultra-high tension. It needs to be high enough to hold the structural integrity of the wheel, not ratcheted several notches above that to ultimate rigidity.

Any time equipment fails I want to know why. Do I have to accept a steady rate of rim loss, given the roads I ride and the way I ride them? That wheel definitely saw hard miles on rough terrain. It held about 60 pounds of groceries in the panniers one day, and 30 or so on numerous other occasions before I got the BOB. But it might have had as little as 10,000 miles on it. I start to dredge my memory, reviewing the career of every wheel I ever built for myself. How did they do, under what circumstances?

It's harder with multiple bikes. Stuff gets put in service at different times. Use hours don't get logged. Looking back I have to estimate how much of each season's mileage goes to each bike.

Racing I expected to burn through equipment. And since I wasn't much of a racer, I didn't really burn through gear that much even then. Crashes took the most toll, if you don't count trashed sewup tires. I rebuilt the race wheels I bought used when those rims cracked, but I inherited all the fatigue they brought with them from the previous owner. He had been a very aggressive rider.

My longest-running rims are Weinmann concaves. I still have a set built in the early 1980s, which have been on and off bikes and now reside in the spare wheel pile because I don't run 27-inch tires anymore. Another set sees regular hard use on the fixed gear. Maybe it's time to revive that rugged design. It's definitely stronger than any box-section rim. I should have stocked up on all the available sizes. Early in the mountain bike boom, there was even a 26-inch model. They're heavy, but they go and go.

Speaking of go, it's time to head off for work. I need to order a rim.

Christmas Evish

Tomorrow the latest Long Haul Trucker is supposed to arrive with the tweak parts to customize it for its new owner. Also in that order I should receive my two-sided track hub to convert for the Traveler's Check. It's hard to wait to build that bike, but I have to spread the next purchases out. Meanwhile I can build a ridable format from stuff I have on hand.

Believe it or not, about ten years ago it was hard to find a two-sided hub. In case it became impossible, I actually bought a 48-hole tandem hub and devised a spoking pattern to lace it to a 36-hole rim. Before I needed to use it, the beginning of the current rush of two-sided options began to appear, so that hub sits unused. It's threaded for freewheels on both sides, actually drum brake and freewheel, so it's less than ideal for fixed cogs. Maybe I'll lace it 48 with double freewheels just because I can. Pimp it out with multi-colored spokes.

It takes up a lot less space just as a spare hub. Wanna buy a hub? How about a pimped out, crazy wheel? Let me know, I'll build it up.

Simple Wheels

The first thing you need to know about wheel building is that you don't need to know everything about wheel building. If you want to lace up a crow's foot pattern or tie and solder, if you want to argue the merits of paired spokes, bladed spokes and ridiculously small numbers of spokes, be my guest. But to build yourself a reliable wheel just remember three cross, inside spokes pulling and 14 gauge.

Build it round. Tension it adequately. Don't use thread locker on the spokes.

Make sure you use the right length spokes so that when you thread the nipples down to the bottom of the threads you have the same amount of tension on each spoke. If you've mixed lengths, the wheel will wobble where the spokes are too long or short.

Most spoke calculators will give you the right offset lengths for drive and non-drive spokes in the rear.

If you think of it, you might want to run outside spokes pulling on the rotor side of a disk-brake wheel.

Don't be afraid of 36, 40 or 48 spokes for heavy-use wheels. Thirty-two is good for all-around sporty wheels.

In wheels, there's nothing wrong with normal. Don't let a fashion trend for weird, disposable wheels cut you off from a very helpful and accessible skill for the self-sufficient rider.

Feel the nipples, don't just twist the nipples

As the tension mounts, you may think you know exactly what to grab and how hard to twist it to get things to move the way you want. But as so often happens, being insensitive can leave you unsatisfied, with someone bent out of shape because you used muscle instead of finesse.

You might think that a particular spoke has to be the one to adjust to smooth out a hop or wobble. You crank on the spoke wrench with as much force as it takes to get the nipple to turn. You might even crush it. Meanwhile, the next spoke one way or the other might have been the key to success.

If the obvious nipple seems way too stiff, feel the adjacent ones on the same side of the rim. One of them might be soft, able to take more tightening to get you where you want to be. You might be surprised to see the shift in the rim seeming to line up with the wrong spoke. But that's why you have to feel the tension for yourself. The truing stand will tell you where the rim deviates, but it does not tell you spoke tension.

A little light lube on the nipples will probably make them turn more easily. The stiff one may yield to more gentle pressure with the right oleo.

When building your own wheels, grease spoke threads so you can tighten them smoothly. A little dab of light oil on the outside of the nipple where it goes through the rim can also facilitate the final stages of rounding and truing.

I don't like thread lockers on spoke threads. Some day you will have to true that wheel, unless you rush out and destroy it outright. You will curse thread-locker then. I know I do.

Some builders use thread-locker when building. Others say to ride the wheel a bit, re-true it and then lock threads with a drop from outside. I just tension them thoroughly and re-true them if necessary after a few rides. Periodically thereafter a wheel might need touching up, but many of my wheels have gone season after season with little or no attention.

If an older wheel needs truing, the nipples could have corroded. They may release their grip with a drop of Pro Link lube on each reluctant one. The problem could be friction where the nipple threads onto the spoke or where it passes through the rim.

As you tighten a spoke, rest your fingers on the spoke itself as you turn the spoke wrench on the nipple with your other hand. You can feel whether the whole spoke is twisting rather than tightening properly. Sometimes if you squeeze the spoke and its neighbor you can release the tension and allow the spoke to untwist. This is useful when tensioning a new wheel as you make more and more rounds of all the spokes. Squeeze spoke pairs lightly as you tighten, one after another.

The N Stands for Nasty

Most bikes are built for one purpose: to get through the manufacturer's warranty period without completely folding up.

Okay, that's a little bit of an overstatement. But some original equipment choices might make you wonder.

When a relatively new bike comes in with one or more broken spokes, I look at the remaining spoke heads for the telltale N. In a total of 45 minutes of internet research and years of idle curiosity I have never been able to discover what the N stands for. N-noyingly brittle, I guess.

It's a trademark of some sort. DT spokes have a little DT stamped on them. Wheelsmith spokes have a W. Some brands have had one or more stars, a crescent, a U (for Union). CTJ (Cheap Taiwan Junk) spokes have nothing at all.

Ralph built a wheel a few years ago with a Sun CRE 16 rim, a used Shi-no RSX hub and a fistful of salvaged N spokes. One day I got to work and discovered I'd ridden the spoke eyelets out of a similar wheel I'd built with DT spokes for my Cross-Check and pounded over rough dirt for several seasons. As a quick fix, I slid the N-spoked wheel onto my bike so I could get home. Within days, the N spokes started to pop. After five had gone in two or three days, I pulled out the Felcos and euthanized the rest of them. After respoking with DTs the wheel has been happily taking the abuse I dish out.

I've only seen N spokes as original equipment on new bikes. Because wheels are vulnerable anyway, you will rarely get warranty coverage for a rim or spoke problem. This may seem unfair, but a rider can do hideous things to any wheel, well-built or not. Run your tire pressure too low, hop curbs, catch a pedal in a corner and get jacked sideways -- any of these will taco the finest wheel or dent the best rim.

Experienced cyclists advise new bike purchasers to buy a bike with a good frame and upgrade componentry. Better wheels will make the most improvement. So if you get a bike with suspect spokes, go ahead and beat the stew out of those wheels and buy some better ones. And remember: original equipment spec is NOT your local bike shop's fault. The manufacturers do NOT listen to us.

Most of the big bike companies treat the small shops they way they treat consumers. It's worse, in a way, because they want our loyalty in spite of whatever crap we might have to answer for as a result of money-driven manufacturing decisions. So don't go into the shop with guns blazing, literally or figuratively. Chances are, the shop is going to lose money making you happy, because the manufacturers are big enough to stonewall them when it comes real compensation for the time and effort shops put into the average warranty claim.