Today's ride: failing to help the guy with carbon wheels and broken spoke

[rwsaunders]

Originally Posted by kramnnim

Someone just need to sell a multi tool with internal nipple wrenches.

Someone with Kysrium SL's would have been in similar trouble...

+1...been there done that and opening the brake pads did nada. Of course, both times I was 25 miles from home and the team car (Mrs. RW) was not home.

[vicbastige]

Boy, some people are almost angry about fancy wheels. Actually I really like mine and look down on cheaper, heavier traditional sets. No way you can be a better cyclist with aluminum wheels.

[beeatnik]

vicbastige, i don't understand your style.

[veloduffer]

Originally Posted by vicbastige

Boy, some people are almost angry about fancy wheels. Actually I really like mine and look down on cheaper, heavier traditional sets. No way you can be a better cyclist with aluminum wheels.

I hope this was tongue in cheek. Otherwise it's wrong in so many ways or a troll post.

[oldpotatoe]

Originally Posted by vicbastige

Boy, some people are almost angry about fancy wheels. Actually I really like mine and look down on cheaper, heavier traditional sets. No way you can be a better cyclist with aluminum wheels.

How's that day of training going when that busted spoke means you ride no further? 'NO WAY'? 'You look down'?.... Yikes, you are a marketeer's dream come true. some of those guys racing that there 'tour of Italy' rode aluminum rimmed wheels...horrors, how did they do it???

[Mikej]

Happened to me twice- first time I was like !&@$ - no cell phone in bfe- I started walking to the first farm house hoping to make a call, and some dude with a suburban pulls up and asks where I'm heading- I said the town and he said hop in in going there-next time I carried a spoke and have since- spoke sticking out of jersey pocket is the new PRO if you ask me...

[texbike]

Originally Posted by schwa86

Any thoughts on anything else I should have considered?

You didn't offer to give him YOUR rear wheel so that he could make it home??? What an A******!

[bikinchris]

Originally Posted by John H.

But then you would need to remove the rim strip, have the tool, etc.
Fancy wheels are over-rated.
Reliability is under-rated.

Hear-hear!

Once upon a time, people trained on their strong, heavy wheels and put their race wheels on for...races. It was a training tool to have the heavier wheels that lasted forever and a psychological boost to feel those light wheels. Your bike felt like a hotrod with the race wheels and you were in the mental place where you felt like superman. Otherwise, why have expensive delicate, hard to repair wheels? Look, folks, those guys in the pro races have follow cars and mechanics to worry about wheels and they don't have to pay for repairs. To wear out and damage those wheels doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
If I won the lottery, I would still ride on hand built wheels, lovingly and skillfully built by hand and designed to NOT need a true after a few rides. I would probably have super nice wheels and use those on 'special occasions' but not every day.

[schwa86]

Originally Posted by texbike

You didn't offer to give him YOUR rear wheel so that he could make it home??? What an A******!

That's the kind of out of the box thinking that makes this forum so great!

[palincss]

Originally Posted by Peter P.

You did all you could.

If a broken spoke causes the wheel to go so out of true that it can't pass the chainstays, then either the wheel is poorly designed or the frame has poor clearances.

As has already been said, low spoke count wheels typically suffer the former.

Large tubed frames such as carbon, aluminum, and titanium, suffer the latter. All three materials need larger diameter tubes than a steel tube of similar stiffness.

If the wheel isn't field serviceable with common tools, then it should be reserved as a race day only wheel.

A couple of years ago I led a 65 mile ride from Thurmont to the Gettysburg battlefield. One of the riders had a spoke break out in the middle of absolute nowhere about 3 miles from the Sachs bridge, on a 36 spoke touring wheel. One of my riders had a Kevlar spoke, but the wheel with the broken spoke didn't go out of true at all, so all we did was duct tape the broken spoke to another to get it out of the way and kept going.

That same day, on a different ride out on Riverside Rd near Maryland Point a guy with an aero wheel broke a spoke. His wheel went so badly out of true the wheel wouldn't turn at all, and there was nothing to be done but sit down by the side of the road and wait for a rider to get back to the ride start and come back with his car. That was a matter of perhaps 2 hours of waiting, but if that had happened on my ride it would have been more like 4 hours waiting (it was a very thorough tour of the battlefield!) and it would have been an hour's walk to get to the only reasonable place to hang out for that long.

There's a lot to be said for reliability and resiliance.

[bicycletricycle]

Lots of spokes wheels are sweet.

Low spoke count wheels on narrow clearance frames require a cell phone and a friend for retrieval.

Low spoke count wheels are for world class riders and professional cyclists only?

[FlashUNC]

He's had it happen before, he knows what he's in for.

That's how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

Your willingness to help is commendable, but you're also not your brother's keeper in that instance.

And I say that as someone who rides both carbon and alloy wheels.

[aramis]

I don't ride fancy carbon wheels (actually don't have a set of wheels worth more than $300), but since I started riding 3 years or so ago I've never broken a spoke and I all the roads I ride on are pretty bad. I did bend a rim pretty bad once though but the spokes were all fine.

I've only noticed heavier guys breaking spokes, is it really an issue these days for lighter people?

[palincss]

Three or four years ago one of the women in my club, a national champion triathalete for several years running, destroyed two carbon wheels on a badly potholed section of the Rt 4 service road out in Waysons Corner in Anne Arundel county, MD. She's all muscle, and I'll bet if you boiled her down you wouldn't get enough fat off her to make up a stick of butter.

The guy I wrote about whose aero wheel suffered a broken spoke that left him stuck in the wilds of Nanjemoy is a big guy, well over 6' and well over 250 lb.

[oldpotatoe]

Originally Posted by palincss

Three or four years ago one of the women in my club, a national champion triathalete for several years running, destroyed two carbon wheels on a badly potholed section of the Rt 4 service road out in Waysons Corner in Anne Arundel county, MD. She's all muscle, and I'll bet if you boiled her down you wouldn't get enough fat off her to make up a stick of butter.

The guy I wrote about whose aero wheel suffered a broken spoke that left him stuck in the wilds of Nanjemoy is a big guy, well over 6' and well over 250 lb.

That's the subject of a separate thread right there. Saving 500-600 grams on unreliable(for this guy) wheels on this 120,000+ gram bike and rider 'package'...