Originally Posted by
dramiscram
HI.
I posted at the begining of summer about my rear wheel breaking spoke after spoke, only on the drive side and followed the general recommendation of getting the wheel rebuilt. After 1500 kms (approx.) on my newly rebuilt wheel I broke another spoke last night on my way home.
The rebuilding job look good but I'm no expert, I will take the wheel back to the LBS tomorow and ear what they have to say about it.
I'm telling you all this because I'm starting to question myself about the whole weight on the bike. I'm at 215-220 pounds and I carry up to 40 pounds of lunch box, spare clothes and stuff on a low end triathlon bike with 700x23 tire/wheel. Am I to heavy for the wheel? I commute 55 kms RT 4-5 days a week on a very rough rural road, lot of big pot holes. The bike was not made for racks and panniers but I modified a few things to fit them anyway so I'm starting to think that it's too heavy
What do you think? Anyone as heavy as me on a similar bike?
You're going to break spokes until you rebuild the wheel with quality spokes (I like DT) in the side(s) where they're breaking (drive side, non-drive side), bring it up to a uniform high tension on the drive side (110kgf is a start) and whatever it takes on the non-drive side, and stress relieve the wheel.
After that you can expected hundreds of thousands of miles out of the spokes which you can re-use as rims wear out.
Of course your chance of finding an LBS to do it for you are slim. You need either a one-man operation where the guy who earned the reputation will personally build your wheel or to do it yourself where it's more about patience than skill (as long as you can read and are willing to - Jobst Brandt test his book _The Bicycle Wheel_ by having his grade school sons each build a wheel set with no other help.).