Originally Posted by lawkd
DT's are still pretty good spokes, but they make the elbows longer than Wheelsmith does. The distance from the spoke head to the bend is unnecessarily long, and they did this to accommodate machine building of wheels. That longer elbow makes it more likely that the elbow will flex more with each wheel revolution, hastening the fatiguing of the metal and causing spoke breakage. Peter White used to have a page up which detailed this problem, but that page is no longer up on his website. He switched to Wheelsmith specifically because of this issue, and uses them exclusively now. I compared both DT and Wheelsmith, and found that the workmanship on the Wheelsmith was jewel-like in it's finish and they just make a gorgeous wheel. I found all the claims that Wheelsmith makes on their website, to be absolutely true. DT can also be used successfully, but I'd recommend spoke washers to take up that extra elbow length. The bad news is that spoke washers are very hard to find.
Thanks for that explanation, lawkd!
I recently had problems with spokes breaking on the elbows on the 32H rear wheel of my commuting bike. Most of them were on the left side. It's laced 3-cross. After 5 broken spokes or so, I got fed up and retensioned the wheel from scratch. I inspected the spokes and several had notched elbows. The notches looked kind of like what happens to a paper clip after you bend it too many times, which makes sense based on your explanation.
I should check what brand of spokes those were that were breaking...