notydino

My girlfriend recently dodged a car and her emergency breaking misaligned the back wheel.

So I bought a spoke wench and alinged the wheel. It's perfect now. I only did half turns (and the associated counter turns on opposite spokes).

Anyway are there any post alignment thingy that i have to do? Or it's ready to go? Some spokes are tighter then others though not much.

bikinfool

You didn't align the wheel, you trued it. Half turns are a lot when truing but if your tension is relatively even on the spokes on a given side then it's probably fine (did you check for just lateral true or vertical true as well?). Before riding it you might want to do some manual stress relief to make sure what you've done stays done. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/tooltips/truing.html

rogerstg

If braking caused the wheel to go out of true, I suspect the wheel is seriously under tensioned. You may want to check that out.

bikinfool

Well, he did say emergency breaking, so maybe there's more involved but good point!

Mike Mills

Something is not correct here. There is no way on earth that applying the brakes (emergency or otherwise) would cause the REAR wheel to warp. Did she fall? Did the bike hit the car or visa-versa?

How is the frame? How is the front wheel? Heck, how is your friend?

jtarver

Sounds to me like the wheel got crooked in the dropouts, not out of true. Slide the wheel to the very back of the drops and check if it falls in the center of the chainstays.

z415

Yea, unless she fell, events of emergency braking won't untrue the wheel. Even severely misaligned rim brakes won't affect the wheel to that degree. I doubt the wheel can be undertensioned enough (as someone mentioned above) to be rideable and be affected by braking.

I agree that the axle being misaligned to the dropouts is a more likely explanation for any abnormal feel after the event. I've had that happen to me and a friend before, and they were both us smashing into cars (I say it that way because we were going faster...)

dvs cycles

Wow. To do this you could only true it on the bike and would have to retrue it if you took the wheel off and did not get it back in exactly the right spot.
Let's hope this is not the case.

bikinfool

I've been thinking about that, hopefully he took it off the bike (possibly all he needed to do), needed truing anyways and now everything's good...as with so many posts, details are lacking...maybe his title was correct all along!

Mike Mills

If the rear wheel locked and then the wheel took a large side load (for example, as part of a falling motion) it could get bent. Once the accident involves a locked wheel and a fall, strange things can happen.

DannoXYZ 

Yeah, but the actual amounts of force on rear-wheel is minimal since the weight transfers to the front during braking. Depending upon how hard the deceleration-force is, there may actually be zero vertical load on the rear-wheel and it'll be real easy to lock up and slide the rear tyre.

Unless of course, there's an impact or a crash of some sort.

Mike Mills

Or a skid, where the rider's weight acts laterally on the wheel. If there is an impact, dynamic loads add to the weight.

oldbobcat

Son in reply to your original question, there are two things you can do after re-truing your wheel. First, stress the wheel. My favorite way is to grasp the rim at quarter past nine and press down. You should hear spokes pinging as they untwist. Then rotate the wheel 90 degrees and repeat, rotate 45 and repeat, rotate . . . you get the idea. Now flip the wheel and do the same for the other side.

The other way to stress the wheel is to simply ride it until the pinging stops.

After stressing the wheel you might need to touch up your work. This time, use quarter turns, or even less, with the spoke wrench.

This is the way I learned to true and later build wheels 30 years ago. Of course, back then I didn't have experts on Bike Forums to tell me what a stupid idiot I was.

notydino

Nope, i'm quite sure the wheel was out of true, I doubt there is anything wrong with the dropout as if that was the case it would be impossible for me to true the rim. (the question was what do i do AFTER true-ing the rim).

Anyway my girlfriend being a novice biker might not have push her weight foward. She did slide sideways with her full weight on the seat. But an earlier post does concern me, I do slides (for fun) all the time, and I do not have problems with my rims. Could it really be undertensioned?

And regarding stress test, I'm not sure why I have to do it? Could you please elaborate the purpose of this test and the *ping* sound and the spokes untwisting itself phenomenon (it is to me). But stress test in itself I guess was already done since she uses the bike to go to work and has to jump several side walks on the way there.

Mike Mills

It's not a stress "test". It is a stress-relief procedure. It attempts to quickly relax the stresses that would relieve themselves over time. If there is a lot of relaxation needed, such as after a major re-truing, it is best to do this while the wheel is still in the jig rather than 20 miles down the road.

The "ping" is caused by the sudden release of the strain energy in the the tensioned spoke/rim. As an example, it could be a nipple, held in one loaction by friction, suddenly rotating in its ferrule.