Mark42 said:
The ebike kit came with the hub motor laced to a double wall rim. It also has reinforcement rings where the spoke nuts come through the rim. I am sure this kit was designed to handle the torque that a 1000 watt motor can dish out. Also, the heavy gauge spokes are used to handle the torque of an ebike motor. There is no reason to re-lace the hub/rim with thinner, cheaper spokes. No doubt they will break. These very stout spokes are what the manufacturer installed (albit not very tight) for a very good reason. Even after "tightening" these spokes, they are still rather loose. IE I can easily pull a spoke and listen to how loose it is compared to the front (aka standard) spokes.
Any who.... After a 15 mile ride this morning the spokes make no noise. The bike rides smooth. And I have no worries about spokes breaking.
Thinner spokes, especially when comparing the spokes that came with your wheel to something else you could buy, aren't necessarily cheaper. Try to buy replacement 12 gauge spokes from whomever you purchased your wheel from, then go try to buy the same length spokes in dt swiss alpine iii 13/15/14 spokes and see which is cheaper. I'd bet you money on which wheel would last longer and need less maintenance.
I understand precisely what you are saying in using 12 gauge spokes, but your assumptions are mistaken and based on false economy, the 12 gauge spoke will not work better in your situation (unless you are truly using a rim made and meant for motorcycles and are using tensions to match) over a straight 13 or 14 and thinner because of the stretching notion I attempted to describe, 15 miles is not 1500 miles or 15,000 miles, your ears aren't a perfect tool to the subtlety of spoke tension, it's insanely likely that your wheel simply wasn't stress relieved and that was what you were hearing. A spoked wheel works a bit differently than you imagine. Explaining all of this better than I already have will be a bit difficult without deeper illustrations and several pages of written word, but the videos I left links to do a great job of explaining the science and theory as well as offer other options to explanations. I seriously recommend you check out those videos I left a link to and watch them through a few times, he gives an excellent explanation of many finer details of wheel building that you don't yet understand. Without reading a few books and watching some dedicated video on this subject it's hard for you or anyone to have a discussion on spoke based wheel.
Mark42 said:
BTW, I pulled up to a cafe this morning and got some food and drink to go. Outside there were 5 adult men all over 50 looking at my bike. They asked me about it. Gave them the basic rundown of electric bike kits and what you can get for under $1000 kit, battery and bike. I had one offer for my bike. Guy was willing to pay $2000 for it especially seeing as it had that "old school" look from the late 50's that he liked so much. In hindsight, I should have taken his offer......
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Sounds more like an opportunity to start up a side business and offer to build an electric bicycle for him and others locally. Seriously, next time someone asks to buy your bike, offer to convert one for them, that's what I'd do at least, but we all approach situations with our own attitudes and per-conceptions. Either it's an opportunity or a burden, depends on how you look at things and hold your attitude. For example, I am looking at this discussion as an opportunity to simply expand the hobby or even lifestyle that I cherish, electric bicycles, through sharing important and useful knowledge with you and others. I seriously want electric bicycles to be used by many and for them to be viewed with a very high esteem.
I feel that in order to take electric bicycles seriously for yourself and others, reliability is of extreme importance, you shouldn't be dealing with wheels that come out of true in short distances, you shouldn't worry about breaking spokes. This is the perspective that I look to when I look at electric bicycles, the approach I take, reliability. If you were dealing with 20,000w+ of power, maybe I'd be telling you to use 12g spokes with a motor with a motorcycle rim. The bottom line is, most of what you will read online is pretty vague and maybe even a anecdotal, I've read a lot of resources on the subject of wheel building and so far those videos I've linked to are the best overall, the only thing I'd change about those videos is measuring ERD(effective rim diameter), the best technique I've come across comes from the book found at wheelpro.co.uk, this book is also worth a read if you are serious about wheel building. I am not trying to stop you from doing what you want to do, but before you make another post about how to build wheels and the best techniques and methods for them, I highly recommend reading and watching these resources. It probably sounds costly, but it's all cheaper than the cost than to pay someone to build a single wheel for you and you gain an immense amount of knowledge on the subject, in other words (to me) these things are basically free. It's like looking at the cost of materials and tools to do a job yourself in your free time, you can view them as a costly expense or you can view them as cheap or free because the labor is on you and the most costly portion of many things.