Bike Forums - Mavic Open Pro ?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trakhak (Post 23371769)

Possibly. Pretty sure I never saw any rims cracking at spoke holes, including mine and those I saw working in shops, until the dark-anodized rims began showing up.

Do an image search for "cracked rims spokes" or the like, and you'll see that the overwhelming majority of the photos are of dark-anodized rims.

Maybe. I did a search and Brandt's article on Sheldon Brown came up.
https://sheldonbrown.com/brandt/anodized-rims.html

May be valid if surface is crazed due to anodizing before forming. On all my dark hard anodized rims dating back to '89, I never saw crazing on the surface. I had cracks at the spoke holes on two different sets of wheels, both rear, both after 4 years at about 7000+ miles per year, so that's not horrible, but clearly was fatigue crack. Socketed rims, also dark anodized, never cracked. By the way, a different set of wheels that I got on a bike from a swap, I rode those for a while to keep miles off my good socketed wheels, got a crack at a spoke hole, but this time I repaired it; I made a socket thimble from the copper jacket of a .30 caliber bullet, so now all of the spoke pull was on the outer wall as the inner was cracked, and I was still using those rims when the bike went into storage in favor of a townie with panniers. That repair held up, even with copper, as it has decent strength when cold-formed, and I did as large a flared rim as I could fit between the sidewalls, to spread the load well into the outer wall. "There's nothing quite so permanent as a *good* temporary repair."