@MLE_online i have no idea how many miles I put on my old Trek or the Marin i have now.
But I've never broke a spoke. Tubes and chains, sure.
Did it just randomly snap or did you hit something etc?
@MLE_online interesting.
Off the top of my head I've had cassettes, chains, tires, and brake pads replaced as routine wear items, and chains and tubes replaced due to field failures.
Never had a wheel rim or spoke go bad in 11 years of frequent (but not daily) bike commuting. Maybe the roads here are just better maintained or something lol
@MLE_online My Trek was bottom-tier "actual bike shop" bike, quite the step up from the $70 "toys r us floor model that I got cheap because it was a discontinued model and the floor demo had a cracked fake leather seat" that lasted me all through school.
The Marin I have now is a slightly higher end "real bike" that I got after selling the Trek when I moved to the bottom of a steep hill and decided I wanted disk brakes rather than rim brakes for going down the hill in the rain.
@LabSpokane Not in my experience. I've built plenty of wheels with good old 13g plain gauge, to spindly DT Revolution spokes. There's nothing inherently wrong with thinner spokes in their durability if the wheel is built correctly. Too many people don't stress relieve the spokes after each round of tensioning and equalisation. That is what most frequently leads to galling, noises during riding, and eventual fracture.
@LabSpokane You grasp it along with the nearest parallel spoke on the same side and squeeze them together hard a couple of times. This creates the overload conditions to plastically set the elbow and the spoke length. When a wheel is fully tensioned and equalised the temporary overload should only result in a slight elastic detensioning of the wheel, and not loosening of spokes and nipples, nor pringling of the rim when its circumferential stress limit is exceeded.
Emily Velasco
Andrew Zonenberg
LabSpokane
Becky T