A customer brought in the front wheel from a Racing Zero for repair.
One spoke is broken.
↑This is a straightforward break, but compared to how often I see spokes get bent from stuff getting caught in them or from crashes and such, a "normal" break like this is actually quite rare.
Breaks at the nipple end do happen occasionally, but I've only seen breaks at the spoke head twice, and in one of those cases there were clear signs of external impact before the break occurred, so you could say pure spoke head breaks are essentially nonexistent in my experience.
The spoke broke right where the nipple threads begin.
Fixed.
↑The replacement spoke and nipple
The flattened section of the spoke shows no deformation. When I asked the customer, they said there's no history of truing, so this spoke-and-nipple combination is still in factory condition, but
there's quite a bit of unused thread.
The spoke has about 9 threads. With the old spoke and new nipple combination I wrote about the other day, the nipple threads sit more toward the inner side, but even then you can't use up all those threads.
Racing Zero and Shamal Ultra aluminum spokes vary in how much of the spoke extends past the nipple depending on the length—sometimes you can see quite a bit of the plain round section where it's not butted, and sometimes it's mostly hidden—but either way, there's always considerable thread margin.
One spoke is broken.
↑This is a straightforward break, but compared to how often I see spokes get bent from stuff getting caught in them or from crashes and such, a "normal" break like this is actually quite rare.
Breaks at the nipple end do happen occasionally, but I've only seen breaks at the spoke head twice, and in one of those cases there were clear signs of external impact before the break occurred, so you could say pure spoke head breaks are essentially nonexistent in my experience.
The spoke broke right where the nipple threads begin.
Fixed.
↑The replacement spoke and nipple
The flattened section of the spoke shows no deformation. When I asked the customer, they said there's no history of truing, so this spoke-and-nipple combination is still in factory condition, but
there's quite a bit of unused thread.
The spoke has about 9 threads. With the old spoke and new nipple combination I wrote about the other day, the nipple threads sit more toward the inner side, but even then you can't use up all those threads.
Racing Zero and Shamal Ultra aluminum spokes vary in how much of the spoke extends past the nipple depending on the length—sometimes you can see quite a bit of the plain round section where it's not butted, and sometimes it's mostly hidden—but either way, there's always considerable thread margin.