Originally Posted by
banerjek
I decided to pick up a new set of rain wheels and got some Alex Race cheap. When I noticed a noise while climbing in my lowest gear, I thought I'd bent my RD since I recently dropped the bike. Turned out one of the spokes was loose -- like finger tight type of loose.. Just for the heck of it, I checked the tension on the other spokes -- I don't think there were any two that were the same tension. How did they even manage that?
Curiously, the wheels seem to ride fine, but I haven't run them through the ringer yet. Still, I won't be crying when I wear these out...
If the rim is stiff enough laterally, you can get a lot of creative spoke tension patterns. They'll all equal out to a "true" wheel, but if you were to measure the strain on the rim, it'd be an irregular wavy pattern. You know how if you break a spoke you can release the tension opposite and increase the tension on that spoke's neighbors to compensate? Same thing, but in spades and across the entire wheel. Also, because rims tend to be high profile these days (as opposed to a low profile box), the rims are extremely stiff in the radial direction, meaning the rim can absorb wildly differing radial spoke tensions and not really show roundness variations when put to a truing stand.
Don't just even out the tensions to fix. You'll go out of your mind chasing a moving target. De-tension the entire wheel and rebuild the tension all the way around from scratch.
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Cat 2 Track, Cat 3 Road.
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