Bike wheel buckled

arcon5

fred246 wrote: »

Just looking. The TS8 stand is £70 at Merlin Cycles. TM1 is £50 (eg Wiggle). So for £120 you can have cheap and super straight wheels till you die! A bargain if ever there was one.

Maybe is, but sadly more than my budget to buy an actual bike - let alone tools

Cycrow wrote: »

15stone + child doesn't really sound too heavy for most bikes.

What type of bike was it ?

its possible that the wheels are just really cheap and low quality, or it could be due to damage, like from potholes in the road

No? It's about 17-18stone total then + weight of childs seat.

With him on the back I ride on the pavement but don't go particularly fast and don't bash up curbs etc.
Once a week a little more brutal with a mixture of road and path and much faster pace.

It doesn't really do that much work tbh. Probably about 5-6miles per week casually with LO. And about 3 miles commute the one day a week i'm on bike.



Still trying to weigh up the new/fixed wheels versus new bike. Problem is I don't want to do either if it means in a few months i'm in the same situation.

SteveJW

Agree with fred246 for the most part, the pleasure of having wheels that are true and knowing you have built them yourself
I've built many wheels all without the benefit of a spoke tensioner, use feel and sound.
Must disagree about having to straighten them every few weeks, in my case it's fit and forget, have ran wheels well past the wear indicators and they have never gone out of true.
Parks instuctions for using a spoke tensioner state that spokes that have low tension will continue to loosen as the bike is ridden
I weigh around 90kg and run mid 1990s Kona
Use Shimano XT hubs, Mavic D521 rims (getting hard to come by) and Swiss DT spokes
Hope you get the bike sorted

fred246

I normally build a wheel then re-true at about 2 weeks and then 2 months. After that I do it every time I take the tyre off.
You CAN make wheels with an old fork, blu tack and a biro and tension the spokes to C sharp or whatever note. I could probably do it now. However I don't think that I would have been able to teach myself wheel building without the right equipment. Park Tools are expensive and there are probably cheaper alternatives.

Marktheshark

Even spoke tension is irrelevant as long as none are unduly loose.
Take the tyre+ inner tube off and the protection tape under the inner tube.
Put the wheel back on without them and slowly spin it looking for a waver to one side or the other.
That means one spoke is either pushing or pulling the wheel out of line.
Thats is how they work, see they go to opposite sides of the hub ?
They pull the wheel towards the side of the hub the spoke goes to.
Either a spoke spanner or flat blade screw driver in the inside of the wheel hub where the protection tape goes and you can quite quickly straighten the wheel by working out which spoke is pulling or pushing it out of line.
Gadgets are not that necessary, most wheels are tuned by eye.

[Deleted User]

Anyone who is having to keep re-truing their wheels is doing something radically wrong somewhere, a well built wheel should stay true for life. There is no 'bedding down' of the spokes if they have been correctly stress relieved, with the spoke line corrected, and the torsion removed. A read of The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt is a better place to start than learning by trial and error.

[Deleted User]

Marktheshark wrote: »

Even spoke tension is irrelevant as long as none are unduly loose.

Gadgets are not that necessary, most wheels are tuned by eye.

Even spoke tension is crucial, if they uneven to start with the flexure of the wheel during use will cause them to even themselves, and the wheel will go out of true. The way to even the tension is by tone, a tensiometer is for getting the absolute tension somewhere near correct, it is nowhere near accurate enough for getting the relative tension even from one spoke to another.

Marktheshark

People were making spoked wheels thousands of years before electronic gadgets were invented.
I bet I can straighten two wheels and be halfway to Scarborough before your gadget has even done half a dozen spokes.
Only been cycling 40 years and never used any electronic or mechanical gadgets yet.
My mark 1 eyeball is my gadget .

fred246

I service bikes for family and friends. No-one has ever given me a bicycle to service with a straight wheel. Why have they not stayed 'true for life'

fred246

Right then arcon5. Use jack_pott and Markthesharks advice and sort your wheel out using your ear and eyeball. Good Luck.

arcon5

Tbh i've already tried myself - the wrench will turn the spokes quite easy. Need a new tyre on it also now as the brake pads were rubbing against certain points it would seem, adjusted brakes now but wheels needs some serious TLC.

So how much do bike shops typically charge for truing wheels?
The tyre I can sort myself easy enough