'80s bianchi volpe wheelset reliability
 

a guy in the town south of me is selling his '80s volpe 700c wheelset with 6-speed freewheel for $30. at that price, i'm interested. but he said he keeps spare spokes in his riding tool bag in case they break, mentioning he rides at weird hours. (yeah, what?) a quick search online also hints at spoke failure. does anyone here have experience with this wheelset?

i was just thinking that my next overhauled flip might need a cheaper set to more easily sell the bike. but i don't want to sell junk.

it's also a pain for me to travel all the way down there. still, the price is right.

i'm able to tension spokes appropriately, if that's the issue.

cheers, all.

Nothing specific about that wheelset but being that old, spokes could be an issue. Lubee, tension and see what happens.

oh, yeah, he said the rims are araya, and the hubs are suntour at.

i usually ride 23c tires, and i think this is a touring bike that came with 30mm wide rubber.

maybe the hubs alone are worth the $30.?.

I think for $30, if they are probably worth it. Did he send any pics?

I assume the broken spokes hinted at them being from the drive side. If you ride on the set I would also bring a cassette removal tool.

everybody knows that spokes have more of a tendency to break between the hours of 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. its just simple physics.

IME, when spokes start to break, it's time for a rebuild. You should be able to easily get an issue- free wheelset from that era $30.

i would pass.

Did he actually say that he had broken spokes on these wheels, or was he just blabbering about how cautious he is?

I'd buy those wheels for $30 in a heartbeat, just for the parts. (Assuming the hubs aren't rough, and the rims aren't worn through.)

Actually, there's some truth to this.... Murphy's Law ?

they were the normal fuzzy cell phone pics taken under a yellow florescent light.

yeah, he said he had the freewheel tool, and i asked him to loosen it from the hub for me.

is it due more to the physical or astronomical?

heh. he's the serious, young student type. which i was once. so ... maybe just blabbering.

yeah. and i've never had suntour hubs. they might be kinda nice.

Astronomical. That's when aliens are more likely to run their analysis rays.

As long as you can check spoke tension, I wouldn't worry about the age of those wheels. It's the wheels from the 50's that would worry me. Aliens' analysis rays were much more destructive back then.

When someone complains, or mentions the need, about replacing spokes often, I assume one thing - he, or she, is doing just that. Replacing spokes that have failed but leaving all the others in place. This is a mistake, in my opinion.

If I ride a wheel that breaks a spoke, I replace the spoke and true the wheel. If a second one breaks, in the same wheel, I replace all the spokes, carefully examine the wheel and consider the wear on the rim's breaking surface. Why replace after a second spoke failure, might be on one's mind at this point? The answer is simple...

Thirty some spokes in a wheel, all experiencing almost exactly the same thing, over and over and over. Put another way, all the spokes are wearing out at the same approximate rate and all are, probably, at the end of their trustworthy life. Expect repeated failures.

Just an opinion, of course.

It's hard to trust a wheel after a 2 spoke breaks. Maybe the problem was just confined to those two spokes or maybe the problem is more systemic. I have a bike with a newish wheel that has been well taken care of which has broken two spokes. The wheel is very true and nicely tensioned but I just don't trust it at this point.

why would multiple spokes break under normal use in a wheel? if tension is assumed good, is it just poor quality spokes?

i was hoping a volpe owner would chime in. but maybe they're all busy replacing spokes.

According to Jobst Brandt spokes don't actually break from tension. In fact spokes can stand much more tension than the rim, and if you tightened them enough the rim or the nipple would break first. The main reason spokes break is fatigue from continued bending at the elbow. The entire spoke and especially the elbow is under elastic deformation. The load is reduced on each spoke when it hits the bottom of the circle and so the bend relaxes back closer to its fully bent shape. It then becomes re-stressed again when the spoke moves away from the road. This continued unbending and re-bending eventually fatigues the metal. The looser the wheel the more this happens. A swaged, i.e butted, spoke experiences less of this stress change at the elbow by having more elastic elongation spread along the thinner section. Thus it can go much longer before fatiguing to the breaking point. The "proof" of this is that spokes usually break when at the bottom of the circle where the tension is actually less rather than near the top where one would intuitively think the load would be greater (but actually isn't).

So when more than one spoke break on a wheel it might be an indication that all of the spokes have seen a lot of fatigue.