Earl Bollinger said:Some spokes may be defective in some fashion. Nowadays the quality control
of the spokes isn't all that great.
IME, good-quality spokes in general are far more reliable today than
ever, but at the same time there are more people using thinner and
fewer spokes than usual. As the limits of spoke capacity are
approached, failures can be expected to go up, but that's not due to a
fault in the materials.
Exception: As you noted, there was a large batch of bad spokes made
in the recent past which were employed by a number of bike
manufacturers unawares; *those* spokes have a QC problem in the wire
from which they were made, but the majority of wheels weren't built
with those.
Quoted message said:Even if the spoke manufacturer has good quality control, the spoke wire
itself may be of poor quality.
A Korean Compnay, a while back, got caught making defective spoke wire. They
had changed their process to make the wire cheaper and it didn't work out as
expected. Which doesn't sound like a big deal until you figure out that that
company appears to make spoke wire for most of the bicycle industry.
The problem appears to have been less extensive than that, though far
more widespread than was originally admitted. The first reports I saw
were to the effect that only a couple of bike manufacturers were
impacted. Then it grew...
Quoted message said:Amazingly enough, most all of the spokes that broke on me appear to break on
the long smooth fast runs where you can get up a good head of steam and
pedal pretty hard.
From what I read that seems to be where most of the spokes break. The spokes
usually do not break going over rough roads, bumps, and such.
Consider the loading cycle; hard bumps mostly accentuate the
*unloading* of the spoke(s) near the load point, but cause very little
or no change in the loading of the rest of the spokes in the wheel.
Thus, spoke breakage is not likely to be more common when thrashing
than when JRA. Since more time is generally spent JRA, the
probabilities favor that period for the breakage event.
--
Typoes are a feature, not a bug.
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