Newspaperguy

This afternoon, I was in a minor collision with a longboarder. (The longboarder was on the road against traffic. I couldn't move out of the way as there was a car beside me.) It was a relatively low speed collision. No one was injured but the board struck my rear wheel. The wheel's now out of true, which wouldn't be a big deal, but there's also a small dent in the rim. Is it possible to safely straighten this dent or will I need to replace the rim?

urbanknight

Hard to tell without a picture, or better yet, inspecting it in person, but in most cases it's better to just replace the rim. If the dent is on the lip, you increase the risk of the tire coming off while riding, which isn't fun. If the dent is on the inside of a deep aero rim and not near a spoke, you can probably get away with leaving it be, but that's the only case that I would personally keep the rim.

BCRider

Picture for sure. And how far out of true is it?

Newspaperguy

Here's the picture of the dent.

The wheel isn't all that far out of true. If the dent wasn't there, I'd have redone the wheel this afternoon.

dabac

(unless the rim is already quite worn) I'd straighten that out and ride on w/o hesitation. There's been a thread about it not that long ago.
Get hold of 3 adjustable wrenches and a friend to help you. Set one wrench on either side of the dent, turn the jaws in to a tight fit.
Put last wrench on dent, it should also be a tight fit and only cover as much of the rim sidewall as the the dent does.
You don't just want to lever the wrench straight out, which would try to bend the rim at the bottom of the sidewall. Ideally you want the bend back to start right at the edge of the dent, so the trick is to more like rotate the wrench rather than just giving it a straight pull.
Start bending it back while supporting the undamaged parts of the rim with the other wrenches.
Remove wrenches, check for sharp nicks caused by the tools.
If any, sand them down using fine grit sand paper before putting tire back on.