Originally Posted by foehn
So what do you all mean by stress relief with the spokes on a wheel? Riding it and letting everything settle in for a while?
When my husband rode with me saturday, he had had this new wheel on his bike for about a week after having the wheel replaced under warranty(the old wheel had started to pull a spoke nipple out of the rim). As of last Saturday he had al least 100 miles on the new wheel after the tensiometer test and about 250 since he originally picked it up.
Is there anything else that we might try to quiet things up? I am about ready to ask the LBS owner to go out with my husband for a short while (of course when husband's bike is cold) so he can really hear what is going on.
Here's Sheldon "Wheel Man" Brown's take on the subject of seating and stress-relieving wheels. What you're hearing as your husband rides is the spokes moving and settling in, so you might say that the wheel is being stress-relieved as he rides; but the problem then is that as he rides, the spokes will loosen, and the wheel will lose its trueness, and to keep riding will certainly not improve things, and eventually might even lead to a collapsed wheel; so the stress-relieving is done as part of trueing the wheel, which is an iterative process, and is done before the wheel is ridden.
Your comment about the old wheel sounds like there was a problem with the rim. How heavy is your husband? What style of riding (road, off-road, kerb-whacking, stump-jumping…)? What sort of bike? What brand hub/spokes/rim?
- Wil
PS: Sometimes noises can be deceptive; are you sure that the noise you're hearing is coming from the wheel?