Rim wear: how long to ride?

I've always wondered about these types of rims. After only 600 miles you shouldn't need to replace your rims, unless your riding like Hans Rey, or your rims have a manufacturer's defect. Keith (Bontrager) is picky about his stuff, so maybe you've done something (a little free riding you're not telling us about...) that has compromised the integrity of your rims. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry.

I wouldn't worry about it until the rim wear indicator starts to indicate rim wear 🙂

Unless you were riding a lot in muddy, dirty, wet conditions, even 6,000mi would be on the low end of rim surface life.

Your brake pads will wear out long before the rim will.

600 miles!?!?! no way!!

Rims will wear out heaps quicker if you ride a lot in the wet.

You can sort of feel how thin they are if you take off the tyre and run you fingers along them. You get to know what a thin strip of alumnium feels like.

Worn rims usually develop a prominent concave appearance which is easy to feel as see.

If a rim starts to "bubble" around the spokes, get rid of it!!
I had a rim that was doing this (an old Mavic CD4), but I didn't think anything of it, so I pumped up my Conti GP to 150psi.
10 miles down the road: BANG!! the rim exploded along with the tyre and tube. A large section of the rim, about 9 inches long, busted off!

Quoted post said:

Originally posted by fabiosav
I have a set of Bontrager Select rims, and they have these “safety wear indicators” (basically a small indentation in the rim) so that when the rim wears a bit the mark disappears, and the theory is that I get new rims. I have 600 miles on them (185 pound guy, but smooth, not hilly road) and I’m skeptical. Would you change them? Still 100% true. Any real “danger”?
Thanks…

Bontrager is not the only maufacturer with wear indicators.
Mavic has them on their T520; the only difference I can tell from their T519.
When the rim is thin enough that the wear indicator shows/no-shows it is time to change rim.
It would be extraordinary for this to happen in 600 miles.
I have a pair of Bontrager Fairlanes with 5,400 miles and they still have about 1/2 their life left as judged by the depth of the wear indicator. I outweigh you by a little, was carrying 40 lbs of touring gear for most of those miles, road through considerable rain and over 3 major mountain passes.

If the indicator is truly gone, you could loose the integrity of the rim and have the tire blow off. I wouldn't risk it! If you aren't sure contact a go local shop and/or Bontrager.
Are you using some abrasive brake pads?

Quoted post said:

Originally posted by nutbag
If a rim starts to "bubble" around the spokes, get rid of it!!
I had a rim that was doing this (an old Mavic CD4), but I didn't think anything of it, so I pumped up my Conti GP to 150psi.
10 miles down the road: BANG!! the rim exploded along with the tyre and tube. A large section of the rim, about 9 inches long, busted off!

"The More You Know": 150psi is way over the certified "safe" limit for even the latest Mavic rims and wheelsets, assuming we're talking about 700x23 tyres.

Their rated maximum pressures (regardless of what tyre brand/model you use) are as follows:

700x19 -- 146psi
700x23 -- 138psi
700x25 -- 131psi
700x28 -- 117psi

I have also broken a rim due to overpressure (the only pump I had at the time didn't have a pressure gauge), luckily I noticed the spoke holes starting to crack before anything serious happened.

Cracks in spoke holes occur due to fatigue in the rim from constant stress and relaxation cycles. Failure from tensile forces like those provided by ovepumped tube do not occur gradually like fatigue but instead occur suddenly (with a bang). Besides, blowing at 150psi does not represent a terribly good factor of safety. Even if you apply a fairly low factor of safety of 1.5 then the rim should be good for at least 200psi with a 23c tyre. This factor would be reduced over time through wear which means that the engineers would have to start with a higher factor.

Cracks cause by fatigue wil however severely weaken the rim making it mor susceptible to failures of many types.

Quoted post said:

Originally posted by rek
"The More You Know": 150psi is way over the certified "safe" limit for even the latest Mavic rims and wheelsets, assuming we're talking about 700x23 tyres.

Their rated maximum pressures (regardless of what tyre brand/model you use) are as follows:

700x19 -- 146psi
700x23 -- 138psi
700x25 -- 131psi
700x28 -- 117psi

I have also broken a rim due to overpressure (the only pump I had at the time didn't have a pressure gauge), luckily I noticed the spoke holes starting to crack before anything serious happened.

No, I have 20mm GPs. I saw those ratings a while ago, and although I'll obviously not totally ignore them, they seem a bit general to me because they have the same rating for all their road rims; even the double side-wall rims.

I'm confident the Mavics can easily handle 160psi, because I've been doing it for over ten years on Mavic CD4s, CXP33s and CXP30. I only encountered the problem because I was too stooopid to notice the worn rim.

Quoted post said:

Originally posted by tafi
Cracks cause by fatigue wil however severely weaken the rim making it mor susceptible to failures of many types.

Sydney, hey? We had a maximum of 9.8 degrees C in Melbourne's south eastern suburbs on Saturday🙂 🙁 YOWZA!

Quoted post said:

Originally posted by daveornee
It would be extraordinary for this to happen in 600 miles.

This depends hugely on riding style/conditions. I have a commuter bike which I ride over hilly terrain in wet, muddy conditions all the time, and it took me only about 1,000 miles to completely wear out a rim (I went through several sets of brake pads in the process of course). But on my current road bike, which has about 600 miles on it, the rims are still polished and brand-new looking - absolutely not a trace of wear or even any indication that they've been used. This is because I do long, unexciting rides on the bike which involve very little braking, and I only ever ride it on clean, bone-dry tarmac.