fwiw. these are two souces of spokes I've seen endorsed a lot on bf.

lkspoke@yahoo.com or http://shop.ebay.com/childhood_dream..._sop=15&_rdc=1
http://www.danscomp.com/products-PAR...14G_Spoke.html

I've had good luck with the double butted stainless spokes (the label on mine said sapim race) and nipples that I got from him.

although it is possible that the problem is due to inadequate spokes, it is also possible that the rim itself is not round or laterally true (or flat). if so, in order to make it true, the spoke tension is necessarily uneven resulting in premature spoke wear.

a new rim and spokes may be necessary as previously mentioned.

If you're breaking spokes a lot and the breaks are at the spoke's elbow, they're not tight enough and are suffering from cyclic stress. Have your wrench tighten them right the hell up.

I had a factory wheel that was crap and broke a lot of spokes. I replaced it with a $100 wheel from Wheelsmiths and it's lasted 16,000 miles without any trouble, never even needed re-truing.

I had the same kind of problem on my 32 spoke, 26" rear wheel, breaking more than 10 spokes in a year.
I heard it could be a spoke tension problem, even though they did seem tight enough and the wheel was true.

Then I bought a Park spoke tension meter, tightened them all up to the proper range (some were 10% to 20% too low).
Since then, I check the tension once in a while because some do loosen a bit over time.
I have not broken any more spokes, so I'm happy about that.

While I agree that a moderately distorted (i.e. one that a reasonable mechanic would use, not a "tacoed" rim) rim may possibly skew spoke to spoke tension consistency, it would have to be an extremely stiff rim to really start to play a role in spoke tension consistency and corresponding fatigue failures. When it comes to pulling the rim into "round" and "true", the spokes are the boss. The rim has very little to say about it. Almost all of what the the rim is doing is offering compressive resistance in the hoop direction so that the spokes have something to build tension against.
You can observe this yourself. How many turns of a spoke wrench does it take to make a true and evenly tensioned wheel impossibly untrue? If you were to totally unlace the wheel at that point (evenly detensioning the spokes as you go), would the rim be distorted? I doubt it. Think about it in reverse. Take a bare rim with 1/4" of runout, lace it up and true it. How much unevenness in the spoke tension do you think there would be, assuming even tension except that needed to correct the rim?

no s**t.

I had intended it as an example. Couldn't locate the 700c.

This is the reason i stay away from disc wheels :thumb: