A customer brought in a Racing Zero rear wheel for repair.
The bike tipped over while the rear wheel was spinning,
and the spokes on the non-freewheel side snapped one after another.
↑1st through 3rd impacts
↑It stopped at the 4th impact.
At a nearby Wise Road bike shop, they suggested spoke and rim replacement,
or buying a new wheel altogether—basically expensive solutions.
But since he didn't go with that advice, here he is at our shop instead.
It's fixed.
I would've preferred my usual approach of replacing only the 4 broken spokes and leaving everything else alone, but that wasn't possible this time. The remaining 3 spokes on the non-freewheel side needed to be loosened significantly to get the spoke heads to clear the hub flange, so I ended up loosening all the non-freewheel side spokes before readjusting.
There was reason to suspect the rim might be damaged. The rim holes were indeed deformed in the direction of the spoke impact. But I judged it repairable and fixed it with just spoke replacement. If the deformation had been in the brake zone, I wouldn't have been able to true it properly, but there was no problem there—it trued up as well as a new rim, so I decided rim replacement wasn't necessary. This wheel made it because this particular rim is thick around the spoke holes. With a standard rim, it probably would've been done for.
↑Replaced spokes
↑Impact marks from the 4th hit.
The bike tipped over while the rear wheel was spinning,
and the spokes on the non-freewheel side snapped one after another.
↑1st through 3rd impacts
↑It stopped at the 4th impact.
At a nearby Wise Road bike shop, they suggested spoke and rim replacement,
or buying a new wheel altogether—basically expensive solutions.
But since he didn't go with that advice, here he is at our shop instead.
It's fixed.
I would've preferred my usual approach of replacing only the 4 broken spokes and leaving everything else alone, but that wasn't possible this time. The remaining 3 spokes on the non-freewheel side needed to be loosened significantly to get the spoke heads to clear the hub flange, so I ended up loosening all the non-freewheel side spokes before readjusting.
There was reason to suspect the rim might be damaged. The rim holes were indeed deformed in the direction of the spoke impact. But I judged it repairable and fixed it with just spoke replacement. If the deformation had been in the brake zone, I wouldn't have been able to true it properly, but there was no problem there—it trued up as well as a new rim, so I decided rim replacement wasn't necessary. This wheel made it because this particular rim is thick around the spoke holes. With a standard rim, it probably would've been done for.
↑Replaced spokes
↑Impact marks from the 4th hit.