Hi. Today morning everyging was fine with my bike, but when cycling back home from work at some point I felt my rear wheel strange but I kept cycling. A few minutes later it started to feel very wobbly and I had to stop. 90% of the spokes lost their tension. How is that possible? I guess it was a chain reaction from one or two spokes that lost tension during the beginning of the ride and then affected the rest?
I checked and I think there is nothing broken on the rim, spokes or hub. Some spokes seem a bit bent but I guess that when I tension them back, they will stiffen back in place.
The problem is that I tried to give some tension to a few of them with the spoke wrench(first time I do it so no previous experience) and none of them are tensioning back.
Could it be a bigger problem?
Thank you in advance!
by No_Cantaloupe_1492
14 Comments
A spoke or nipple is broken.
go to a bike shop and let them retrue the wheel NOW. before you go with a fucking hammer and pipewrench at it 🙂
Basically, you answered your answer there. One spoke or more go lose, rest losens with them, and thats why most shops that sell bikes give a 1 year free checkup, to catch such issues early. Its part of a regular maintenance (and needs a special spoke nipple key). You can do it at home, but i’d get it back to an OK tension by a pro first, since you lost quite alot of tension, then you can learn how to do it yourself.
The worst thing you could possibly do is start trying to sort it out if you don’t know what you are doing you will almost certainly make it worse possibly even damage it. Tightening spokes and retrueing wheels isnt something you can just have a go at you need to know what you are doing, It’s not overly hard to learn enough for basic use but good wheelbuilding is an art.
Is the hub flange maybe cracked/broken? Apart from that or a cracked rim I can’t think of anything else which would make all the spokes lose tension.
This is really poor quality, a decently made wheel would never sink to this level.
No problem here, keep on riding!
That wheel needs to be retensioned and trued. Bring it to someone who knows how.
Don’t wanna mess around with spoke stuff without experience. Get that thing trued up by a bike shop and you’ll be good
Only explanation I could give that is someone messed up the lacing pattern & the hub was able to rotate slightly making all spokes loose at the same time…
This should not be possible at all. Is this a factory built wheel?
Wheel needs to be rebuilt.
Poorly built wheel. There’s a lot of wheels out there with barely sufficient tension on the spokes. Under tire pressure and load, the spokes loosen up. If they go totally slack and you don’t have any threadlock (linseed/loctite/deformed thread) they rattle looser.
Other possibility would be nipple threads failing, but that would usually happen one or a few at a time. Your inability to get it tensioned back up is probably just that it’s so loose. It will take a bunch of turns on all the spokes to get any tension. A few spokes tightened till they bottom out will just pull the rim sideways or out of round.
Depending how long you’ve ridden it, all the spokes might be fatigued. If they are, they won’t break all at once. Bike looks shiny, so I’m guessing low miles. Have someone tension it back up or teach you how if possible. If it breaks a spoke eventually I’d re lace it.
I need more than quick video to give a meaningful diagnosis, but looking at it frame by frame, do I see spoke threads above the nipples on a lot of spokes? I shouldn’t see any exposed threads on the spokes. You said you rode it home from work, where is it parked while you’re working? My best assumption, if it was fine when you went to work, is that someone loosened a bunch of your nipples. Do you have an enemy or a jagoff practical joker at work? Did you cut someone off in the parking lot? This isn’t really something that just spontaneously happens without apparent damage
Edit: How many miles have you already put on this wheel? It could be possible that the threads just pulled out of the nipples if the parts are extremely low quality. Is this wheel set up tubeless? If the spoke nipples are alloy your sealant could have corrided the nipples away inside the rim. I just fixed that issue on an expensive set of my own Zipp wheels. Had to replace all the nipples with brass because half of them were shockingly corroded
Fairly common on machine built wheels. There are videos on how to re-tension a wheel properly, but it’ll take a while on your first go-round. Note: when checking tension, the drive side should be higher than the non drive side.
how new is the wheel?
at the shop i used to work at, we trued every wheel out of the box. which was probably overkill, especially considering that 50 or so miles will cause things to settle and stretch, but many cheaper wheels come out of the box out of true or with de-tensioned spokes. on the flip, the one set of wheels i ever built myself (with lots of tutelage from mechanics long in the tooth), have required minimal truing in spite of me riding on them regularly for years. a mechanic should definitely be consulted.