In one week I will have been riding for 1 year. I started on a Giant Escape hybrid , and since got a Giant TCR. My wife has a Escape also. We have broke many spokes!!! I just had my third broken spoke yesterday on my TCR!! Anyone think this is normal?? Or any reasons as to why this seem to me to happen too much. I had my Escape re-laced . Any info would be appreciated

How heavy are you and your wife?

Once you start breaking spokes on a wheel, it is best to have it rebuilt with new spokes. That shouldn't cost too much. Perhaps $70 for a wheel. It is imperative to find a skilled wheel builder, however, if you can't do it yourself properly. Not every LBS mechanic is a good wheel builder, but few will refuse the job.

That's normal for heavy riders, although properly built wheels don't break spokes for the first few hundred thousand miles regardless of rider weight.

Bike companies make more money dealing with occasional warranty returns than they do investing in expensive Holland Mechanics stress relieving machines or paying for expensive hand labor to prevent your problem.

Spokes fail due to fatigue, with the number of cycles survived (about 750 per mile as a spoke passes the bottom of the wheel) dependent on magnitude of the variation and average stress. Magnitude of the cycle comes from the rider+bike+load weight with about 60% of the total on the rear wheel; obviously this is more for heavy riders. Average stress is high because parts of the elbows were never taken past their elastic limit during the forming operation.

Since they all see the same conditions they all fail at about the same time like popcorn kernels popping - first a few some time apart, then most of them in rapid succession, then the remainder.

You need to replace your spokes with quality butted spokes and properly stress relieve by taking the elbows past their elastic limit. You can squeeze near parallel pairs of spokes hard (gloves make that more comfortable), or wind them about eachother at the outer crossing using something softer like a plastic screw driver handle, old left crank, or brass drift.

Realistically, that means doing the job yourself or finding a reputable one-person shop to do the job. With the low end of the market buying $25 QBP wheels and high end mostly boutique the average shop mechanic doesn't get enough experience building wheels to do a good job in a profitably quick time so they compromise by doing a bad job fast. As some one not trying to make a profit building wheels you can take hours to get it right provided you have a little mechanical aptitude (about what it takes to adjust a front derailleur).

Broken spokes are never normal. They're the sign of a crappy wheel build. I ride tandem with my wife and our whole rig weighs about 330 lbs. going down the road. We have never broken a spoke in 7 years of reasonably high mileage riding, including loaded touring over cobblestones. Our wheels are normal 36H bike wheels, but they're properly built.

Added: there are 3 rules for never breaking spokes:
36H
Deep section rims, 25-30mm
Double-butted 14-15 spokes
Spokes tensioned evenly to the rim manufacturers specs

Right....pretty much everyone is spot on with wheel build quality here. In reality, if your using mass produced, OE wheels, they tend to be too high in tension and they use the most cost effective (i.e. cheaper) materials they can get in order to protect profit margins. Even my OE wheels went bad in a few months of heavy riding on my Fuji Roubaix and I get around 175-ish in the summer...not a super heavyweight...not feather light...but I'm generally hard on stuff in the first place. Consider a handbuilt wheel, even if you use your existing rim and hub, a good wheel builder can re-lace it with high quality spokes and you'll have miles of smiles.

I'm of the belief that breaking spokes is not normal for any rider under normal conditions, unless we're talking about extremely high mileage.

I'm also of the belief that OEM/factory wheels are no more prone to spoke breakage than "handbuilt" wheels.

I think it's highly unusual that both you and your wife are breaking spokes on three different bikes, and it suggests to me that maybe you're wheels are from the same builder, you've been fussing with them either yourselves or by someone else, or that you're mishandling and abusing the wheels (perhaps in storage or transit), or you're riding under extreme conditions or with great carelessness.

It could be something else is going on, but we need more info before it can said to be typical or expected or whatever.

It is sad but true thst spokes do break under normal use. Maybe you haven't experienced it, but lots of others have.

Oh, I have...20 years ago. I ride and race with a lot of people, hang out at a bike shop, and I just don't see it happening normally. Sometimes a noob will build a wheel and mess it up, or try to true one and cause failures of spokes, and even sometimes grossly inelegant riders will break one slamming through potholes, but I think that spoke breakage is pretty uncommon nowadays.

So yes, it happens, but *nobody* has spokes break regularly on multiple wheels on multiple bikes in the same bousehold between different riders like this without doing something wacky to cause it. No way.

I weigh 209 pounds , average 175 miles a week. I ride 90% on a bike path. Last year for the 10 months I rode over 4000 miles. I never transport my bike . I leave from the house. I'm riding on Conti gatorskins with 100 psi . Ps. I air my tires before every ride. All 3 bikes are Giants, and have Giant/Shimano wheels. I don't think I'm hard it my stuff, but I'm aggressive I average 20 mph, for 20 miles. My longest ride was 84 miles. I really appreciate ALL THE FEEDBACK . Thanks to everyone who has replied

Well, that shoots my theory to crap! Perhaps you should contact your shop and have them see if fhere was a recall on your wheels by either Giant or Shimano, or checking with Giant yourself.

I still think it's highly unusual for spokes to breaking on you as they are, so let's see if there was some manufacturing flaw which might explain it.

To be clear, two of the wheels are OEM Giant and one is a shop rebuild? The original wheels are the ones that came from Giant and are not third-party? Innother words, your bikes are catalog spec builds and not shop custom?

Of course there is always a reason why it happens. It is just that the reasons are fairly common occurrences. In addition to all the reasons you mentioned, here is another one: Back in the early '90s I obtained a bunch of "house brand", stainless, aero spokes from Performance. They were wide blades with a pure S-bend at the hub end instead of the usual J-bend + bead end. That way you could attach the spoke to the hub without having to thread it all the way through from the nipple end, which was impossible due to the width of the blade. They were very good looking and inexpensive, but were not worth a crap. Check that...they were worth a crap. They broke constantly. I don't know what Asian source they came from exactly, but I suspect Pillar. In any case, they had to be replaced on the rear wheel after a few months, but I rode with them on the front wheel for years. That was just one of many possible reasons for spoke breakage. Maybe Giant is using inferior spokes.

Interesting what you say about "20 years ago" when straight gauge spokes were more the norm. We now recognize that butted and especially extremely butted spokes are more durable. So it is not surprising the that incidence of broken spokes in quality wheels is declining as the use of highly butted spokes like Revolutions, Lasers, and CX-Rays increases.

[MENTION=183557]rpenmanparker[/MENTION] it is possible that Giant is having an issue-- there's a thread in the mechanics forum right now about a Cypress breaking spokes-- but man, don't you think that'd be kind of unlikely prima facie, but then to strike three bikes in the same household?

None of which is to say it can't or ain't happenin', but I totally disagree that it's common or normal, simply by the numbers.

What I'm saying is that you can't disqualify a reason for a spoke breaking as "special case". It is always a special case, i.e. there is always a reason. If you think spokes don't break often, you should go ask your LBS about it. I bet they are replacing spokes all the time. Maybe the best built wheels, made from the best components, ridden by the most careful riders who weigh no more than they should for the particular wheel design, etc., etc., never break a spoke, but so what? The rest of us mortals have to deal with it. But sure the OP's story is a bit odd. No argument there.

I may be wrong about spoke breakage being relatively uncommon, but hopefully you'll forgive me for thinking that because although I've done group rides on some of the worst roads in the nation since junior high back in the mid '80s, I seriously can't recall being on a ride with someone who broke a spoke since the '90s; I think my friend Deb had one go on a ride out near Manchester in '95-'97, somewhere in there. I had a ****ty wheelset on a Diamondback Master TG that broke several in the early '90s before I upgraded to a Bridgestone RB2.

Yeah, my memory is pretty bad, admittedly, but really, it has been a long, long time. Crashes are more common it seems to me. Loose spokes...those too, seem more common. But broken spokes just seem to be a relatively rare occurrence. Of course, it's not the fact that a spoke broke that's vexing me here, rather that it's multiple wheels on a trio of bikes with two different riders in the same household that's just kinda crazy.

There's always a reason for breaking spokes. I've never broken a spoke in decades of riding, but the few I've seen break were on wheels which were insufficiently tensioned. It's never too much tension. That will pull a spoke through the rim, but won't cause it to break. It's always too little tension which causes the spoke to break through fatigue failure.

Yeah, I bet some LBS do see broken spokes all right. There are some LBS, people, and manufacturers out there who either don't know how or can't be bothered to put out a properly tensioned wheel. The facts outlined in the OP are totally explainable by the above. Let's call it a cluster. Sometimes there's a reason for a cluster other than random probability.

Have had spokes break twice on my new Giant Roam (rear wheel, cassette side). It's a barely ridden 2012 purchased on Craigslist a few months ago. I don't know for sure what sort of abuse the previous owner may have put it through, but nothing harsh from me - all road miles on nicely paved streets. It's been over a month since the last break, so hopefully it's over. I'm watching this thread with interest.

I see what you're thinking, but Giant sell a lotta, lotta bikes, so either it's going to be very easy to establish there is a quality problem with some or all of their wheels, or it's going to be very difficult to do so.

Are your hub, rims, nipples, spokes, spoke count the same as the OP? Is the service history the same? Have they ever been trued or retensioned by anyone after leaving the factory?

Those are the kinds of terms around which you'd want to build a case that Giant has chronic wheel problems. It may be you're onto something class-action worthy, or it may be there's another explanation.

My gut says that exploring the causal factors is not going to be worthwhile for most people, and that simply replacing or rebuilding the wheelset or wheel will be enough.

Haha! That's steaming pile of BS they gave you! The lacing pattern is called radial, and it has been used for a long time, but is particularly popular the past decade or two.

Just noticed I have a loose spoke on the NDS on my Giant TCR Advanced. Came with the PSL-1 wheels, I think. I discovered it because it caused the wheel to come out of true. Only have about 600 miles on the wheelset too...

OP -

1. you shouldn't have that many spokes breaking based on what you put for weight and usage.
2. The oem wheels are most likely spoked to lightly for your use. 209 is svelte by American standards but hefty for bike components.
3. The issues as I see them- the design and build of the OEM is leading to unloading of nds spokes. Leads to breaking. The biggest problem is who you are taking them to for repair. They are doing a horrible job and don't understand wheels. This is actually common in the vast majority of bike shops out there. Even if they read a book, took a class, were "certified" by a bike school or OEM - very few people really do understand what's really going on with a wheel system. Most likely they are simply putting a replacement spoke in, tensioning it and truing the wheel and handing it back...meaning you'll be back soon.

To whomever keeps saying that spoke breakage never happens - you don't ride enough. All spokes will eventually fail via fatigue even when they are high quality spokes and the wheels are built correctly. The thing is that the fatigue life for most of the modern spokes that we are using ends up being a lot higher than the life of the rims in most cases. That's the main reason we don't see it as often.

Hey . Great info. Thank you very much!!

+1
Low tension is one likely cause.
Have the spoke tension checked.

Where are the spokes breaking?

Breaking at the threads/nipples may mean an improperly laced rim.

I've started popping the heads off of some generic spokes on my front wheel. All outbound spokes with the heads in the middle, 3 so far. Unknown wheel age/history. However, what I've noticed is that the spoke heads for the generics don't appear to be fully seated. The replacement DT brand spokes are much better seated.

Anyway, I'm very much in favor of paying that extra $10 to get name brand spokes over some generic that doesn't even have enough pride to put their trademark on them.

So, you could buy another cheap generic wheel... and probably eventually get the same problem. Or, you could purchase a quality wheel, or get yours rebuilt, and hopefully the problem will go away.

I didn't see anyone saying spoke breakage never happens, but it's cool you don't see it often, or as often as rim failure (I'm not quite clear which you were saying there).