Splitting Rim
 

I've been riding my formula/Sun m14A for about a year and a half and recently noticed that the eyelets have begun to pull out form the holes slightly. The lbs said it's not a huge structural problem as eyelets aer only there to spread tension around or something along those lines. I heard some jingling inside my rim last week and removed my tires to find that it's tiny little pieces of eyelet. I have also noticed the rim has small hairline cracks (<1cm long) developing out form some spoke holes.

Bottom line: Will this lead to my death?

eventually

Death? Possibly, but more likely just a broken collar bone or something when the rim fails and you go over the bars. It should not be ridden on more than is absolutely necessary.

Cracking rims..never heard of that. Is that common? Sounds like junk.

It is a pretty common way for rims to fail. That it happened after a year implies the rims were over tensioned.

If you had the LBS tension them for you demand that they make it right for you. That means new spokes and rims, I would not trust them to rebuild the wheels.

If an eyelet disintegrates, the spoke will pull through and lose tension. Which means the wheel will go way out of true. So yeah, it will pretty certainly fail sooner or later.

There's no reason to suspect that the failure will be catastrophic, but it may. I wouldn't ride it more than strictly necessary.

Rims don't normally split in half along the middle, but I've read about such an event as well on BF... not fun.

Everyday is absolutely necessary, but I'm in the market for some hubs for a new wheelset.

What should the proper tension be for a rear wheels? These were around 22-23.

22-23 what? Are you talking a specific tensionmeter reading? Spoke tension is generally quoted in kilograms force (kgf) or Newtons.

Different manufactures of rims have different limits of max tension. Theres an example table here:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/tech/fix/?id=tm_1

Generally, I've always tried to go for about 100-120 Kpf for spoke tension (for anything other than non-drive side on a road hub). But it depends on spokes, rims etc.

When building wheels you have to pay attention to both average spoke tension and max/min tensions on some of the spokes that are a little more/less tensions than average.

i wouldn't trust that shop...

I built them over a year ago and have checked them about every 3 months. Yes, the 22-23 is the Park Tool tensionmeter reading. I followed the table that came with it, which is how I arrived at this arbitrary number.

I was curious if anyone had experience with other brands or other eyeleted rims having a similar problem.

The tension that the Park meter gave you seems alright Andy. Usually the max number you don't want to go over for your wheels is 25, with that tensionmeter. And I agree that the eyelets having little cracks isn't something to be concerned about immediately, as in soon-to-be death, but the cracking of the actual rim is pretty nasty. I would def. look into getting a new wheel or wheelset, like you said you were.

Curious though... did you stress relive and check if you need re-tensioning before riding them?

Take care dude.

I think so, I gave them a good squeeze all the way around and retensioned when I first built them.

Ok thats good.

I wouldn't think it would be directly related if you did not, but the friction that built up might of affected the tension on the eyelet.

What wheelset are you looking to get?

This same thing happened to me on a Sun rim it was the high profile one. I forget what the name is. But yeah the eyelets began to pull out, so i built up a new set myself, having not built the original set.

I have a set of aeroheads waiting for some hubs, I'm thinking pauls.

cowboy-How long before they started pulling out?

Perhaps a ****ob is in order?

Get off of those rims as soon as possible.