First off, forgive me if this has been previously addressed, as I have not searched all the threads trying to see if this has been covered, but could not find anything yet, so, here it goes. I'm a vintage rider, on a vintage bike, and had an eyelet pull through my rim. Does anyone know of a way to salvage the rim? Can I put in another eyelet or repair it somehow or is it just going to pull through again? Vintage equipment is going through the roof lately so if I can save it I'd really love to, but certainly understand if it simply won't work.

Thanks for all the wisdom out there and its collective answers!!!

In some rims you can make them go longer with a kludge
using a washer of the appropriate dimensions, but it's
usually a temporary fix.

As you suspect, for all practical purposes, you rim has
ended its period of useful service. Recycled, it will now
make excellent beer cans.....also very useful.

700c or 27"?

27x1" rims are prolly hard to come by these days, unless you have a decent co-op nearby... I actually came across a nice eyeleted one today at the one I volunteer at.

Pity we haven't invented teleportation yet; you could have had it for $10.

What rim brand and model are you talk about??? If you are normal sized and normal weight probably nothing will happen to the rim (explode or something), the only thing is that probably another eyelet will crack at some point (months or years after)

If it's a showpiece bike and not ridden much, you can probably salvage it with a washer larger than the enlarged hole. If you're talented you can probably get the eyelet back so the damage isn't visible. But if this bike is for riding, you're at the beginning of the end, and should star scouting around for a new rim.

How about modern rims with cracked spoke holes, has anyone tried drilling a new hole next to the cracked one?

I have a couple of Mavice CXP-22 32h rears with 105 hubs, good spokes. Both of them came to me after some misadventure involving lack of dork disk resulted in a bent DS spoke and cracked spoke hole.

I had wondered about drilling the inside end of the eyelet off, making a new hole and using just the upper part of the eyelet. They don't use a full eyelet on the cheap OEM versions of the wheel anyway. The position wouldn't be ideal but I thought it might be OK for a light rider.

I nearly spat out a mouthful of food when I read that... wouldn't dream of it.

Well it would be ugly and weak but so are many of the world's wheels when they leave the factory, they still have their place.
Maybe the rims that crack are all heat treated after drilling and hooping etc, so they would be now too brittle for new machining.

Here's another untested wild idea:
Rim starting to crack around a spoke hole: Accept that the spoke tension is going to reduce drastically soon anyway. Drill the ends of the crack to stop it spreading, and replace the spoke with a very skinny one at a tad lower tension. The peak tension under bumpage will be much reduced by the stretch in the skinny spoke, but the rim will still be true as it passes through the brake blocks. Assign wheel to light duties.

There's a big difference between what I'd do If I had this problem while touring outer Mongolia, and what I'd do at home or elsewhere where a replacement rim was available.


The difference between a brilliant idea, and utter nonsense is often the context. Just because something might work, at least for a while, doesn't make it an intelligent decision when there are other better option.

It is comforting to think of those worse off than ourselves. In New Zealand we can drink yummy wine instead of distilled fermented yak milk. Our currency is worth more than that of Outer Mongolia, and the Chinese don't really control us yet.

Still, here the price of a worthwhile new rim plus rebuild is a significant proportion of what a student will pay for a beater bike to get them through university or part thereof. I need to find a way to target bike ads at weedy girls who ride under 500km per year and study subjects that don't have heavy textbooks.

My reference to Outer Mongolia wasn't related to income, or cost of bike parts, but strictly about availability.

I started touring long before parts for my Italian 10s bike were readily available throughout the USA. Those who toured back then learned to rank reliability, and field serviceability above almost anything erlse. Even so, we were often forced to do some very creative field repairs just to make it to the next town, then better field repairs to get to where parts could be found. (I once rode 50+ miles on s10 inches of spiral wound surgical tape, traction was terrible but it got me to civilization, that doesn't mean I'd make a surgical tape tire for my commuter)

There are so many salvageable wheels out there headed for the dump, that unless one find's themselves totally stranded otherwise, there's no reason to attempt the desperate type of repair described in the most recent posts here.

Vintage parts are expensive sometimes if you're looking for a popular or rare item. If you're not so picky, you can probably find an inexpensive, same sized rim to rebuild your wheel.

Good or fixable whole fronts are easy but the rears over here are often too wonked to stay true for long.

OK OK I give in, I'll learn how to build whole rear wheels to re-use good front rims. I was hoping to save that for a retirement hobby.


Here is a puzzle:
Good welded 27" alu rim, 36 x 2.0mm spokes, 304mm. Laced 4-cross with some head interference. Screwon hub, 131mm OLD! Solid axle, badly bent of course.

Is that just someone finding a use for 28 s.s. spokes from an old tubular wheel, or could 4-cross be chosen for its own merits? (10 spokes are galv with 3mm thread showing, which suggests the former).

I have a suitable 7s QR axle & bearings, plus s.s. tub wheels to wreck for spokes.
Is it sensible to repair the wheel as 4-cross, just replacing the short spokes?
Good 27" rims are not common here so I don't want to damage it.

All of my wheels have been bought used, often in the form of a complete bike. Hundreds of wheels, over the years. Given the PO's location, look aggressively, and find some good used wheels.

Rochester, IL should have good hunting, I have done well finding bikes in Illinois.

Sun CR-18 rims are decent, and widely available in 27":

https://goo.gl/UYiea

The number of crossings is a rough measure of how tangential the spokes are. Anything more than 90 degrees from radial is obviously fail, head interference aside. For a driven or hub-braked wheel, the more tangential the better, but not by a whole lot, as long as it's not radial. In other words, radial's bad, 1x is a lot better (and easily sufficient, unless it's a hub-braked front), 2x is a bit better again, and on low flange hubs, 3x is ideal. 4x on high-flange hubs (assuming 32-36h). For rim-braked fronts, radial is slightly better than tangential, offering easier truing and small benefits in weight and aerodynamics, although only a good idea if the hub is forged and has beefy flanges, or is straight-pull or something; there has to be enough metal in front of the spoke elbow. Whether radial spokes used on one side or other of the rear wheel are a good thing or not probably comes down to each individual design.

So having said all that, it's definitely not worth a bit more tangent to uglify your wheel by bending the spokes over their neighbours and risking failures as a result, particularly for the front. If you can get your hands on a thread roller, you can use those spokes to build your wheel 3x... I did just that today, in fact.

Looks like 27x1&1/4 (which is actually about 25mm, and 27x1" is more like 20mm). After a bit of googling, I find a figure of 22.5mm (440g)... good for the rear. Bit more googling shows a few other options, Sun's M13 II, Weinmann's LP18 (no eyelets though), for example. Postage is prohibitive, but perhaps a LBS could order one for you.

Thanks!
Sun CR-18 seems suitably invincible for a touring rear, and the width and style fit my 1979 bike.

Direct mail order from overseas is cheaper and sometimes faster than the LBS here.
International postage costs from the USA can be scary so most folks here buy from the UK or Europe.