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Old 08-30-15, 04:19 PM
  #10  
brawlo
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How do you ride back up that hill? Do you give the bike attitude, meaning do you tend to pull on the bars to cause the bike to lay over a bit as you crank on the pedals? This is a wheel killing technique. Wheels can cop a lot of abuse in the vertical plane, but they are very susceptible to side loading. This massively increases the load on the spokes and can lead to the failures you write of.

Having said that, I have had negative experiences with 2 of your rims. I had a number of spoke holes crack on an A23 rear. I'm a fair bit heavier than you riding those wheels from around 130kg down to about 115kg. The A23 rims were from the early years of that rim. I had a guy from Velocity on here suggest that it may have been the quality of the rim and that now they have shifted manufacturing and the QC is a lot better. Maybe you had similar issues? After breaking that rim I went for an OP rim to replace it. When I got it I was told that the more recent Mavic rims aren't as good as the older ones. The rear was very hard to true and I ended up breaking a spoke on them. The mech I took it to for truing had a good reputation but crazily ended up putting loctite on the nipples! BIG no no and so those rims are on the shelf for me to use as a project for relacing and most likely I'll just ditch the rims for something with a higher profile.

Building wheels for larger riders requires higher spoke tensions. This means that you're a lot closer to rim failure than a lighter person. If you ride hard with hitting potholes, laying the bike over when cranking the pedals etc, then you'll send the wheels to an earlier grave. Double butted spokes give more flex which will certainly help in this situation if you aren't already using them. I'd also be looking at a different rim option that is either higher profile or with a thicker spoke bed or even both.
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