Saturday, August 31, 2013

Are they shadows that we see?

Today I got the bicycle back from the repair shop, and they didn't charge anything, as the back wheel has been in repairs so often without getting in shape. I hope it holds this time. I had a little test run, and it seemed to hold, but only time will tell.

(Posting title is from the poem Are They Shadows by Samuel Daniel.)

2 comments:

cj goad ~ photography said...

If it's just your back wheel going out of true you might think about learning to fix it yourself. Grab a book on bike repairs and a spoke wrench and have a go at it. Cheaper than the bike shop. Where I live (Canada) rates start at $40. an hour so I learned the basics. If you can keep the back wheel in true the front one is a snap.

Juha Haataja said...

It is not really the wheel going out of true, it is the spokes breaking near the rim of the wheel, one after another.

I have a gear hub in the back wheel, Nexus 8, so-called red-band version, and I had the old gear hub replaced after 15 000 km, when it had worn out. At the same time the rim, spokes, etc. were replaced with new ones.

But then, spokes started breaking so that the screw thread part stayed in the screw at the rim; the spokes break at the place where the thread stops.

I have been thinking that perhaps the wheel is not put together properly, but I'm not sure what would be the right "pattern" for a gear hub. The gear hub is bigger than an ordinary one, and so the spokes are more angled when they start from the rim, and thus there is sideways torsion which must be a reason for the breaking.

I borrowed from the library Bike repair manual by Chris Sidwells (in a Finnish translation), which gave some instructions on how one should approach truing wheels, but still I have no idea what is the problem here.