I ride only 36 and I ride up and down curbs and some stairs. I keep breaking spokes at the hub. I have the wide hub with the nightrider rim and 14 guage spokes. I don’t want to change back to the superwide hub. In my opinion too much side to side wobble. Any suggestions?
Aj
If you are breaking spokes your spokes aren’t tensioned correctly. Your best bet would be to bring it to a bike shop and have them re-true your wheel. Once that starts happening this is the only real solution, i’ve been through it with a bike wheel. I kept replacing the same spoke and finally had to rebuild the wheel, then it was fine.
The two main causes of spokes breaking are insufficient spoke tension and movement of the spoke head within the spoke hole on the hub. Tensioning your wheel will help with the first of these (do it yourself or take yr wheel to yr LBS). Note new wheels need to be retensioned after about 5 hours of riding, as the spokes stretch and the heads ‘bed in’. If increasing the spoke tension doesn’t help and you keep breaking spokes you can rebuild your wheel using spoke washers which reduce the movement at the spoke head.
There was a thread on this before:
http://www.unicyclist.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70758
New spokes (the whole wheel) and bindings on the cross-over points have fixed it for me.
Yeah, it is tension. I’ve had both wheel builds; one I did (with Chuck’s help) without a gauge, and I broke 4 spokes. Two others with a gauge (and experienced help), and never broke spokes on those. The latter I also used brass washers.