Bicycle Mechanics - almost taco'd wheel...how to fix it...

i bought a mountain bike to cruise around campus while im here at college and it seemed to be pretty beefy atleast enough to jump curbs and hop this and that. well anyhoo i hopped onto the sidewalk kind of sideways yesterday and it tossed my wheel out of true pretty bad.

my question is if i want to try to get it atleast close to back to normal, should i just tighten up the side that i made loose, or should i loosen the spokes that got extremely tight from the tweak first and then adjust them from there?

i dont really care if its perfectly amazingly true, i just need to get it as close as i can...as i dont have enough money to take it to the bike shop and have them true it right now.
any help is appreciated, thanks a bunch.
-Louie-

Tighten the spokes on the side you need to move the rim to. If the rim is off to the left, tighten spokes on the right. Ideally, you'd have adequate tension on both sides, but it sounds like you're going to end up with a rim that will have floppy spokes on one side, and overtightened spokes on the other side. Your rim is probably toast, but if you can get it straight enough to go through the brakes, just be a little easier on it until it finally does taco or break a bunch of spokes.

In the mean time, try some garage sales or goodwill to see if you can find a $15 bike to pull a wheel off of.

Depends. There are actually two different possibilities.

If you just came down hard on the side of your rim, you probably bent the rim. If that's the case, the spokes on the side that the rim is bendt toward will be loose. You can try to pull it back into line by tightening the spokes on the opposite side, but you'll never make a good wheel out of it. Eventually you are going to have to replace the wheel.

Sometimes that kind of incident will pull the rim "over center". When that happens, the spokes pull the rim into a potato chip shape. That's fixable provided that you don't try to ride on it too much first. Some guys just bang the rim on a work bench or hold it against a wall and try to push it back "over center" into line again. My solution is to loosen every spoke until one thread shows and hope that the rim springs back into line. In either case, you need to retension the wheel a little more or it'll do the same thing again sometime.

I almost taco'd my rim recently. I don't know if this is good for you but this worked for me:

1. remove wheel
2. remove all spokes
3. clean it out since its off
4. place rim on flat surface to see if its bent
5. straight rim with hands
6. onces its pretty straight, put the wheel back together
7. true it

it worked pretty good and my wheel was in bad shape. im still using the wheel on the mountain bike trails and has survived alot