I picked up a free second hand trials wheel. Person giving it away said it wasn’t true. (It was missing a spoke). Well, I tried to fix it, replaced the spoke, found there was rim damage. (Inner rim was broken in a number of places) Anyway, I still tried to true it, and it was still wonky.
Anyway, I put a question out on Facebook and the brains from the wheel building Facebook group said don’t use it. (I’ve spoked and trued a wheel before so it’s not like I had never done it before).
I loosened all the spokes and the wheel wouldn’t spin true.
Anyway, I decided to take it all apart (figured that I could still use the ISIS hub)… anyway, after doing that, I see one of the flanges was a bit bent too!
Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is, it’s possible second hand unicycle equipment you collect is in bad condition, though it might look ok at first sight. If the previous owner was rough with equipment, maybe give the equipment a miss… on the other hand, if the seller decided to buy new high quality Unicycling equipment and decided they couldn’t get the hang of Unicycling… that’s a different kettle of fish.
I am happy I didn’t go to any real effort to collect it. A friend was going to be in the area so I asked her collect it while she was in the area, otherwise it would be a 2 hour train ride each way for me to go there to pick it up.
That’s annoying. I saw your post of FB and it looked pretty hit. I guess trial unis get a lot of abuse… not only because they’re jumping around, but also because most of them belong to careless teenagers!
Usually, trial wheels end up their life totalled as seen from time to time in trial video. However, based on your description, it feels like you can still salvage some parts for sure (tube, tire, cranks…) and possibly the hub too.
The optimist in me is guessing that you are not a trial expert so you won’t push the hub to breaking point tomorrow. And the pragmatist in me would add that you are not risking much money if you build+true the wheel yourself. The day the hub fails on you, you will go back to the work bench and replace the hub.
(Disclaimer: I’m not a trial rider by any mean imaginable)
I figure it’s not worth the effort. Ps. It didn’t come with cranks or pedals or tube etc. just the hub, bearings, spokes, rim, plus 2 wrongly fitting bearing holders (they seemed to be suitable for a cotterless setup!)… bearings seem ok though.
Well, now it’s taking apart, so too late I guess, but riding a pretty beat up wheelset for trials isn’t exactly unusual. I obviously haven’t seen how beat up the one you got is, but if you just want to learn some hopping onto 2-3 pallets, might have been fine to just use it for a bit.
It doesn’t take that much for them to be fairly beaten up, but to then get them to fully fail takes quite a bit more (I’ve never actually fully killed one, despite riding a lot of trials and street many years ago).
But yes, as with getting anything used, you occasionally can have bad luck, even on unicycles.
Both of those problems were pretty common with older trials wheelsets. Especially during the early ISIS era. The bent flanges aren’t really a very big deal but the cracked inner surface of the rim means it is about to fail. It used to be a major problem and the reason KH went to oval holes. I’d still ride it on a unicycle as a catastrophic failure on a trials unicycle isn’t as big of a deal as on a bike.
Unfortunately trials wheels are a bit of a consumable item for many riders.
