Originally Posted by
pdlamb
One of the engineering dictums I've been hearing for years: "Better" is the enemy of "good enough."
No.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Any engineer with his salt will make something “better” if possible and especially if better materials and equipment comes along. The whole point of “something better coming along” is because some engineer thought they could make an improvement.
Originally Posted by
ThermionicScott
That's fair, and I suppose I was "asking" for someone to respond along these lines.
A rear wheel with more spokes, double- or triple-butted, and carefully built, would certainly be better.
But at the same time, I have a bunch of wheels with straight-gauge spokes in the collection, some of them used for many thousands of miles before I re-tensioned and stress-relieved them, and I still wonder if anything will actually go wrong with them in my lifetime. Out of morbid curiosity, I'll be leaving them configured as-is.
Thing is that I’ve done exactly the same experiment and found that there is something better that lasts longer without the hassle of carrying extra spokes or trying to replace spokes on the side of the road. Been there, done that far too many times.
People keep making the same assumption…that somehow the “build” isn’t right…when it comes to spoke breakage. It isn’t. Pillar Spokes has actually done the measurement of spoke strength and the results are very clear. Double butted spokes are stronger than straight gauge spokes and triple butted are significantly stronger than either.
This article explains why. Eric Hjertberg isn’t just some smuck who blogs on wheels, by the way. He is the founder of Wheelsmith and knows a thing or two about spokes, wheels, and wheel building.
This article links to his 1986 Bicycling Magazine article series that I used to teach myself how to build wheels…and I still refer to it. I’ve largely pirated it for my classes on wheel building that I teach at my local co-op.