The Woman with Exploding Nipples

 It could happen to anyone with a low-spoke-count, highly tensioned wheel with trendy alloy nipples. They start popping without warning. This customer had come in a couple of times already for single incidents of nipple failure.

This rear wheel had 27 spokes: nine on the left side, 18 on the right. The rims were a little deep, but not hard to work with. Weird-looking wheels are part of what makes a bike look modern.

To begin, I had to remove the tire. Because it wasn't a punctured tire, I went to remove it without tools. When I pushed down on the wheel to work the bead around, another nipple exploded. I called the customer to let her know we were going to do a complete nipple transplant, not just an individual replacement.

On the stand, two more nipples popped when I put a wrench on them to start loosening them. This wheel had been a real time bomb. Imagine ripping down a bumpy descent when one spoke after another detaches from the rim.

Fortunately, the diameter and thread on the bladed spokes matched the DT brass nipples I was planning to use. And the low spoke count made the swap less time consuming. I would never ride a low-count wheel myself, but I appreciate the time I save on jobs like this.

This has also been the Summer of Forgotten Through Axles. We've had several in a row. A rider calls up and asks if we have through axles in stock. We explain that there are different kinds (of course). They're not sure of the brand and type. We figure it out. We had one kicking around from a previous customer's special order that they then declined to pick up. We've accumulated one or two more, to try to cover some of the possibilities.

Next up on the list of modern problems, a mother and daughter had to forgo their bike ride because they had forgotten the keys to their ebikes, turning them into nothing more than immensely heavy regular pedal bikes. You can just ride them that way. It's a common claim in the advertising. But who would? No one, actually, unless they get caught out with a dead battery and have no one to call to pick them up.

Problems like this are right up there with forgetting the charger for your shifters. If you have electronic derailleurs and a dead battery, you got nothin'. 

There's still plenty of good old abuse and neglect to keep us busy. I figured out that the handlebar tape on these bars was about 15 years old when I removed it the other day.

The bars themselves were old enough and had been through enough rough use that I recommended replacement. The last bars I saw that had that much salt and oxidation encrusting them had been on a bike that had lived in Singapore for a year or two. Those bars were so deteriorated that I could poke a screwdriver right through them. These bars were nowhere near that level of deterioration, but still a risk according to most manufacturer recommendations. Better to be safe. It also gave us a good opportunity to put on a much shorter stem for the new rider of the bike.

Accidents will happen. One of the local ebike aficionados took a digger on their chunky steed. The owner called to see if we would work on it. To make it easier, he had contacted the president of the company that made the bike to hook us up with a direct pipeline to parts and advice. With clout like that, ebike ownership is smooth sailing indeed. When a bike weighs upwards of 60 pounds, it hits the ground with more force than a bike weighing less than 30. It also hits a rider with more force, should you happen to get on the wrong side of things as they're going every which way. The rider was apparently not hurt badly enough to be worth mentioning, so that's good. I was just musing about it as I looked at what was scuffed and tweaked.

The trickiest part will be replacing the battery case, which is cleverly inserted into the welded rear rack on this Pedego bike. It has thick cabling inserted into it, and has an irregular shape that does not appear to slide easily out of either end of the framework of the rack. The screws that hold it in place broke loose when the bike crashed, because they were never designed to restrain such a heavy piece of equipment in an impact at an angle. The good news is that the owner of the bike doesn't need it fixed instantaneously. We can put it off for at least a week or two before getting mired in its complexities.

Exploding Spokes

The season of urgent repairs has arrived. People come to town for the weekend. Something goes wrong with the bike. They plead for emergency care.

Last Thursday it was two guys carrying a Specialized Secteur. It was 4:30 p.m. The shop would close in one hour.

"The bike was hanging in storage all winter," said the owner. "When I brought it out, a bunch of spokes were broken in the rear wheel."

I asked about the usual things: could a car have hit it, could a heavy object have fallen against it, do any people have access to the storage area who might be pissed off at him? He dismissed each of those possibilities. That left us with four broken spokes on the drive side, cause unknown.

The owner said that the bike had been hanging by the front wheel from a storage hook, in an unheated space during last winter's phenomenal cold spell in Boston. I had never encountered spoke failure due to cold, but there's a lot I haven't encountered. Still, I would have expected the rim to fail before the spokes. Or, more likely, the rim would contract more than the spokes, relieving tension on them.

I said I could not adequately investigate this mystery in what remained of the day. I would need a few hours to see if this thing would be safe to fly, even with the broken spokes replaced.

The spokes were all in a row. The rim is DT. The spokes are DT. The hub is one of those Specialized-labeled ones that look like they say SIXE if you read them upside down. It's "Axis." They've fixed the font now, but I liked it the old way. I can't remember what I read about those hubs, whether they're DT or Formula or some other generic maker. No matter.

The spokes had not broken at the bend or the threads. They had snapped somewhere in the middle. The edges of the breaks showed no pinching, as they would if a cutter had been used.

A cruise through the Internet turned up some forum posts about bad OEM spokes of Asian origin a few years ago. I had seen failure of various OEM spokes myself, but never DTs. Another forum thread mentioned corrosive environments that weakened spokes. The spokes on this bike did show signs of that. They had a black finish. On close examination you could see cracks in that, and some crusty residue. I sanded away the black around one, carefully and gradually, to see if the crack extended into the metal beneath. In my test area it did not appear to.

I determined the proper length for replacement spokes and installed four. Put the wheel on the stand and tensioned the new spokes. Straight, smooth, round, the wheel looked good. I stepped away to work on something else before I put the bike back together.

BANG! A black spoke snapped, sending the nipple-end across the room.

That's annoying. Glad I didn't have my eyeball down there, sighting along the truing stand calipers.

To me, that was the end of any stop-gap repair. This wheel needs to be rebuilt. To complicate the problem further, the non-drive-side spoke holes in the rim all showed little stress bulges. Nothing had cracked yet, but it made the rim a questionable candidate for the investment of parts and labor to respoke it. I don't know why the non-drive side would show stress that the drive side did not, but this wheel was clearly weird.

BANG! Another spoke fired off. That's it. This thing is dead. I took our spokes back out of it and set the remains by the rest of the bike, with some cloth draped over it as blast matting in case any other spokes decided to blow. It was less likely now that the tension had been reduced. Still, I didn't want any of us to have to dig a spoke fragment out of our leg.

While the front wheel had not misbehaved at all, its spokes had been in the same environment as the rear ones, and there are only 24 of them between the rider and a screaming face plant. Low spoke count wheels are technically strong enough for the stresses of performance riding, but they sacrifice most of their margin of safety by putting more and more load on fewer and fewer parts. When one part fails, the structure deviates much more than it would if more parts were carrying the load to begin with. Are you really going to rip down some exhilarating descent, congratulating yourself on the money you saved by not rebuilding or replacing that front wheel?

Not my decision. I did advise the owner to think about getting both wheels redone or replaced. Because he claimed -- as do they all -- that the bike barely had any miles on it, he was going to take up the matter with the shop where he bought it.

Barely any miles. Not that old. We hear that all the time. Your average ten-year-old bike is between fifteen and twenty years old. A guy brought us his 15-year-old Cannondales on Sunday, and they are 23 years old. Bikes we "just tuned up" show up in the repair records from two years ago.

Sunday started with barely enough work for the number of people on the schedule. We did not get a wave of check-ins, but the couple we did get kept us turning wrenches and looking useful until closing time. Summer has shrunk from the cheerful chaos of the 1990s and early 2000s to a brittle, somewhat desperate couple of months at best, starting on the Fourth of July weekend and not quite making it to Labor Day. But the warm weather can bring us little waves of business any time from now until the fall foliage fades.