Biketouringhobo

14-15-14 ga spokes VS. 14 ga spokes for bicycle touring???

[FONT=Comic Sans MS][/how strong is 14-15-14 ga spokes VS. 14 ga spokes under fully loaded touring bicycles and I see most new touring bicycles comes with 14 ga spokes and in 11-2008 my Surly LHT 26in 52cm 2008 came with 14 ga spokes and in 9/2013 I had a custom wheelset made with 14-15-14 ga spokes and I wanted 14 ga spokes and I told the guy at the bike shop in San Diego, CA to use 14 ga spokes and he used 14-15-14 ga spokes on my wheelset and I also like to build a 2nd wheelset with 14ga spokes or Sapim strong 13-14ga spokesFONT]

rifraf

I'd be thinking those 14-15-14 gauge spokes are plenty strong enough.
I'm not familiar with the terminology but I'm assuming they are whats called where I am, butted spokes.
They are considered of a higher quality than plain 14 ga spokes and will suffer less fatigue.
In theory they should last you longer.

Theres some info on this page:
What are the pros and cons of Double Butted vs Straight Spokes when building a wheel? - Bicycles Stack Exchange

ironwood

I've never seen a spoke break in the middle; I've only seen them break at the hub on the drive side. Maybe they do break in the middle, but I don't know of any cases.

Straight gauge spokes are cheaper and heavier.

psy

The way I understand it, Double butted spokes offer better "shock absorption" meaning less broken spokes and a stronger wheel. I use double butted spokes on my touring wheels and IMO the wheel builder did the right thing.

Biketouringhobo

Thank you

Biketouringhobo

Thank you

LeeG

I'm not exactly sure if there's a question here. When I was light I built with straight 15 gauge spokes and never broke a spoke. Built a fair number of wheels at the time and noticed most broken spoke wheels came from poorly built and poorly maintained wheels regardless of spoke gauge. Building for heavier people, which I am now, I used straight 14g spokes. Once you get to 36 spoke wheels and 14g. spokes you've got some tough wheels with butted spokes supposedly providing greater life.

I also wanted to build up an extra duty 26"rear wheel with 13g. butted spokes but gave up on the search.

my $.02 is that they're unnecessary for the front wheel and if your load is that big that 13g spokes are a good idea make sure the tire psi is up.

B. Carfree

According to the late, great Jobst Brandt, author of The Bicycle Wheel, among other things, butted (swaged) spokes will make for a stronger wheel than straight gauge. It reduces the stress at the threads and elbows, where most spoke failures occur. From page 47:

MassiveD

Yeah, but one of the curiosities of Jobst was that he ran the same spokes on his wheels for like quarter or half a million miles. He said if one spoke goes, cull it then just keep reusing the same spokes with the same hubs, only replacing the rims, of which he had a stack of the same type to hold him his whole life. People quote Jobst, but they are probably naturally thinking of spoke lifespans in the few thousand miles, not the few hundred thousand miles, and it makes a difference.

So if my straight gage spokes are only 85% as durable as Jobst's butted, then they are only good for what, half a million plus whatever Jobst could have got if he had time, minus the 15% haircut. That sounds like something I can live with.

Another thing Jobst pretty much promised is that fatigue would be a non-issue if you had the wheels properly stress relieved.

But yeah, the butted spokes are top of the line. There is some contention in touring circles which is better, good enough, or has ancillary advantages that may be telling, but nobody would worry about their being butted, in any serious way.

MichaelW

I have used 14/15g butted spokes on my tourer, but an unfortunate chain incident convinced me that they are not up to the task. If you can avoid accidental chain gouging they are strong enough, but once you gouge them, with a heavily loaded bike on rough tracks, they will start to fail. I have gouged 13/14g spokes in a similar fashion, but these never failed. DT and Sapim make 13/14g

bradtx

Biketouringhobo, IME wheels with 14-15-14 ga. required less frequent truing touch-ups than straight 14 ga. wheels. Both wheel sets were very similar except for the spokes. Strength of either was never an issue.

My two touring bikes have straight gauge spokes, one has 14 ga. and the other with 15 ga. spokes. The one with 15 ga. spokes (OEM spec. in '96) is an ultra high mileage example with a couple of 14 ga. spoke replacements in the rear wheel.

Brad

thumpism 

I have seen a butted spoke break at one of the butts but most spokes do break at the hub flange. I built my touring wheels with straight gauge spokes but wouldn't not tour on butted ones if that's what I had.

fietsbob

i have been fine with straight spokes for 40 years.

pdlamb

I had a "chain incident" with 14 gauge straight spokes, which resulted in 4-5 of those "heavy" spokes breaking over the next few months. I think it depends on how badly an individual spoke gets scratched or gouged; a stress riser on any gauge will cause problems.

Lesson: adjust derailers carefully.

Same experience here. Butted spokes are dead easy to build up, and last a long time. (Still riding to find out how long a long time will be!)

Biketouringhobo

I am making 2nd wheelset with Sapim Strong 13-14ga spokes as my Touring Wheelset and my 1st wheelset with DT 14-15-14ga as my everyday wheelset!

fietsbob

Then Why did you ask ?

cyccommute 

The article you linked to is wrong on many counts. The most important one is that the straight gauge spoke is "stronger". The Pillar website is one of the few places where I've seen actual data on spoke strength. The graphs below are for straight gauge



double butted



triple butted



and single butted like the Sapim Strong



If we look at the breaking strength of 2.0mm spoke (14g), the straight gauge is relatively weak compared the 2.0/1.8/2.0 (PDB1415) double butted spoke. That spoke is weaker than the triple butted (PSR2015). One surprise for me is the strength of the single butted PSB 34 which is far stronger than any of the others. Strength is also gained by going to a thinner midsection. The PSR2018 is stronger than the PSR2015. That may be due to the more elastic midsection.

LeeG

Cycomute, it looks like the differences between straight gauge 14 and the various butted 14 gauge spokes is pretty small compared to the 13 g spokes.

Wouldnt it it be nice to have a wheel torture machine that could test different wheels to failure and correlate spoke tension, tension uniformity and spoke type to see how those differences manifest themselves?

i had a very nice 700c rear wheel built up by PeterWhite with 14/16 Wheelsmith spokes and a Velocity Synergy offset rim. While building up another bike I bought a quality prebuilt rear wheel that was straight 14 g on a Mavic 319. What surprised me was how laterally flexible the Synergy rim with butted spokes was compared to the 319 w straight 14 spokes. If I adjusted the brake pads two close on the Synergy the rim would rub when I got out of the saddle. With the 319 I could have the pads closer. I'm sure the butted spoke wheel is plenty strong but the difference betwee the two wrt lateral rigidity surprised me.

Biketouringhobo

I wanted DT 14ga spokes in 9/2013 on my custom wheelset and the bike shop used 14-15-14ga spokes
and that is why I am making a 2nd wheelset with Sapim strong 13-14ga spokes!

I don't know anything on bloody spokes and how strong 14-15-14ga spokes are!

Biketouringhobo

thanks

MassiveD

Well of course that data is for their spokes, they can make as crappy straight spokes as they like. But more importantly, the tests are of little practical importance as spokes do not fail by being first stretched many mm, their failure mode is normally fatigue failure in badly built wheel, and not at all in well built wheels used within design limits.

Tourist in MSN

I am not sure if I am reading this right. Does this say on the first graph that a 14 gauge (2.0mm) straight gauge spoke will fail above about 270 kgf and the second graph says that a double butted 14/16 gauge spoke will fail at about 280 kgf?

Is the horizontal axis spoke elongation for a typical length of spoke on these graphs?

For most of my wheel builds, I used Wheelsmith DB-14 spokes, 2.0/1.7/2.0mm. What is the gauge of a 1.7mm mid-section?

saddlesores

right. and what's the windspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

does it really matter (straight vs. butted) if quality spokes are used to
properly build up a wheel?

MassiveD

I'm with you, though there is a theoretical interest to the subject.

I think those ratings are nonsense as far as relatability to the real world. But even as what they are, they beg the question of how they are possible. The theory for DB spokes isn't that they are stronger because the midsection is narrower, it is that they are more resilient, kinda springy. How are these thinner rods stronger. Possibly they use a stronger alloy; have a better feature set in the bends, the heads or the threads, because the spokes have some seemingly sophisticated features; or maybe something about the drawing process hardens the spokes. Hard to say. Obviously irrelevant, but not obvious what they did to stack the figures.

rifraf

It was indeed a poor page to link to, having read more carefully after your post.
However, I'm currently standing by my post which wasn't supported by my link:

"I'd be thinking those 14-15-14 gauge spokes are plenty strong enough.
I'm not familiar with the terminology but I'm assuming they are whats called where I am, butted spokes.
They are considered of a higher quality than plain 14 ga spokes and will suffer less fatigue.
In theory they should last you longer."

Im a fan of butted spokes and indeed my current wheels would have been rolling with triple butted Alpine 3's had their j-bend been deemed suitable for my IGH hub.
They weren't according to the manual so I went with Sapim CX-Rays instead whose j-bend was acceptable.
So far so good and no regrets and equally importantly, no broken spokes after some heavily laden multi surface terrain touring although in fairness, more miles on tarmac than off-road.
I believe the OP, Biketouringhobo, has a good set of wheels, which kept serviced and tensioned annually, should last him many years.
I believe him at no disadvantage for having 14-15-14 ga spokes and in fact owning a superior set of wheels compared to his initially requested straight gauge spoke specification.