A side effect of a rainy day
I was taking the trek out to deliver a wheel to a friend, but while I was in the middle of taking a nice fast turn off 17th I rolled over the edge of a nice rain-slick manhole cover. The rear wheel broke loose, slid cheerfully sideways, and came to a fairly abrupt halt at the other edge of the offending chunk of cast iron.
And when it came to that abrupt halt it did an impromptu restressing of the rim, which caused it to immediately reshape into a pleasantly taco-like form, which then meant that it jammed itself into the brake and fender, stopping any forward rotation and toppling me and the bike over into the middle of the street.
Fortunately I was only two blocks from home, so I could pick up the xtracycle, carry it back without much trouble, then use the mlcm to deliver the wheel and retrieve Silas from Llewellyn.
And now I get to decide whether to
- relace this wheel,
- get a new rim + spokes and build a new wheel, or
- convert the trek to 650b.
But I’m not going to decide that until after this weekend, because I’ve already got plans that will take up most of my time until Monday.
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It’s an good demonstration of just how much of a lever arm a long bicycle can be, isn’t it? When I detensioned the wheel (expecting to see that the loose spokes had torn through the rim or hub) I found not one crack or stripped thread, even though there were 4 NDS spokes that had about 1/16th inch slack in them. The only thing that looked like a taco-related incident (aside from the taco-shaped wheel, of course) was that the pin joint on the rim looked like it had been squoze together a bit more; the manufacturer’s decal has a little crease in it above the rim now when, as best I can remember from when I first laced it up, it didn’t.
In any case I’m going to relace and (try to) retrue the wheel no matter what. I need to go up to the Community Cycling Center to pick up a new 130mm hub anyway, so I might as well look and see what they’ve got in the rim department as well.
Bonne Route!
Everything I’ve ever seen says “if the rim undergoes inelastic deformation, that’s it; it’s had all the biscuits.” (Well, OK, perhaps not in those exact words.)
So I do hope you get a rim, too! Because that one’s fate is to become coke cans or similar.
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Yikes!
That looks more like a torsional failure than the shape I associated with a failure-in-tension taco shape, which is somehow scarier.
Glad you’re not hurt!
Yesterday’s thunderstorm was merely gusty enough to blow one of my contacts out, which, while novel, isn’t actually threatening as such.