XxXGodXxX said:
Balmorhea said:
There are plenty of people on this forum, who've had all kinds of wheel problems and various remedies and should know better, who also believe, contrary to evidence, that thick spokes are better. They're also wrong.
This is hard for me to believe frankly. It makes logical sense that a thicker piece of metal is gonna be stronger and more durable than a thinner piece of metal. In my own experience ebike and regular bike 12g has served me much better.
It’s not a spoke’s job to be as strong as possible. It must be strong enough, while also having enough elasticity to follow the rim as it flexes, without going slack. That implies strong material, but thin diameter. A spoke is a very specialized kind of spring. You don’t want a spring to be as strong as possible— you want it strong enough, but also stretchy enough to do its job. The spring action of a spoke is lengthwise, like a rubber band. Even a thin one is very stiff in that direction, which can work okay because a rim doesn’t deflect very much when it’s supported by spokes all the way around. But if you substitute a spoke that’s too thick for the rim, it’s not stretchy enough to follow the rim as it squishes under load, and the spoke goes slack for the moment it’s loaded. When spokes go slack, the rim loses support, and it squishes more, which makes other spokes go slack, etc.
The end result is the spokes won’t stay tight, they leave larger and larger spans of rim unsupported, and they move around and cause cracks in the rims and ovalized hub holes. Anybody who has used 12ga or thicker spokes in regular bicycle rims for very long has had to deal with some or all of this. Chronic chafing (fretting) from unwanted movement at the spoke elbow can even cause the spokes to get surface cracks and break, despite being thicker and stronger than ones that don’t break.
The set of wheels I have used the longest, since 2002, with no broken spokes or out-of-true problems at all, have very thin 15-16ga spokes (1.8-1.6mm). But there are 48 of them per wheel, and good strong tandem rims with double eyelets. I have replaced axles on them, even switched them among different bikes. But the spokes need no attention, despite having accumulated lots of miles as a daily commuter.
I think most of the people who mistakenly favor heavy spokes with bicycle rims are comparing only against their earlier wheels that had problems, but that’s not a good comparison. Most likely those were sloppily built without stress relieving (like most OEM wheels), or else made from cheap junky components (like most OEM wheels), or both. But rather than get a good wheel built carefully with proven parts, they skip straight to the Lincoln Logs and decide it’s better. In a lot of cases, spoke breakages will actually go away if you do that. But the spokes won’t stay tight, the wheel won’t stay true, and the rim gets puckered or cracked sooner or later. You may or may not break spokes, but you don’t get a dependable, low maintenance wheel.
Mopeds may move faster than your bike, but they usually have much less gross weight. You can hope you’ll never knock a pig-heavy mag wheel out of true, but keep in mind those things are much more heavy than strong. If their strength-to-weight ratio were comparable to wire wheels, you’d see lighter versions of them on bicycles and motocross bikes everywhere. Cast aluminum mags had their day on BMX and freestyle bikes in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. What we learned was that they are really heavy, not particularly strong, and not repairable when they get bent. There are Chinese aluminum bicycle mags on eBay, if you feel like making that mistake for yourself decades later.
If I had your bike and I wanted to run it at 500 pounds gross, I’d use a hefty freestyle rim like
Sun Big Baller. For spokes, DT Swiss or Sapim 14-15ga double butted if I could get the right length, 13-14ga single butted if not. I’d lace cross-2 to a 3-speed hub like what you’ve got, or cross-1 to a larger diameter hub like
Sturmey Archer RX-RK5. Turn up all the spokes to at least 120kgf of tension.
Stress-relieve thoroughly.
