A customer dropped off a Kysirium rear wheel with us.
A spoke broke during a lap around Lake Biwa — what they call a Biwai-chi ride.
Thinking the bike might get damaged if they kept riding (※)
they walked a few kilometers and hitched a ride back
with someone they knew.
※If the tire or rim isn't making contact with the frame and it's just barely grazing — like shoe rub — you can self-pedal just fine.
The spoke snapped inside the nipple while frozen in place.
When they took it to a nearby shop,
they were told that Mavic wheels have to be sent to the distributor (service center)
for repairs.
MTB suspension overhauls and repairs get sent to the service center as a matter of course,
but I've rarely heard of that for wheels.
Maybe Velomax and its successor Easton,
plus Shimano wheel rim replacement service — that's about it.
Since a race is coming up (next week),
the service center timeline wouldn't work,
so they weren't sure what to do.
Then three people they knew all mentioned our shop,
so they brought it in.
They said I could write about this, so:
the customer is from Shiga Prefecture.
After replacing the spoke and truing just that section,
I found two other spots with significant runout.
The image above shows the center offset at that rough truing point.
In the condition they brought it in, it was wobbling like a potato chip,
so I couldn't see the provisional center.
For workflow reasons I worked with an anti-freewheel-side tightening bias,
so the provisional center in the image above definitely has a slight mix of what I just did,
but it probably had nearly this much offset even before the spoke broke.
The customer also noticed there was radial runout.
That came from previous truing history.
Even though Mavic has slack wheel-building tolerances,
the radial runout exceeded the manufacturer's shipping spec.
By chasing down both radial and lateral runout,
I was able to dial it in from a state of center offset alone
to dead nuts.
The broken spoke and nipple were seized,
but many of the other spokes were pre-seized too.
↑Replaced spoke and nipple
The aluminum nipple fractured inside where it was seized.
With mild seizing, you could grab the nipple side with a nipple wrench
and grab the spoke head with pliers-type tools
to break the seizure and turn or remove them —
even if you're not putting the wheel back together.
But with this one, even that wasn't possible.
It's basically one solid lump.
Why do we have Mavic spare spokes in stock? It's because
Mavic dealers buy spare spokes in 10-piece bags,
but you only need one or two for a repair, and
there are plenty of crappy shops that force customers to buy
the whole 10-piece bag.
In those cases, we've been buying the unused spokes from customers.
Since spare spokes we get this way are limited to wheels that are common
and have common failure points,
when we get another Mavic wheel with issues in the same spot,
the odds are high — and we've gotten lucky helping people that way.
The Mavic distributor — while maybe not legally binding —
should issue a notice forbidding shops from forcing customers
to buy unnecessary spare spokes.
That this is tolerated is genuinely wrong.
If the distributor set up a feedback channel on their SNS like #forced_spoke_bulk_buys
and followed up on reports with fact-checking,
I think you could stamp it out pretty easily.
A spoke broke during a lap around Lake Biwa — what they call a Biwai-chi ride.
Thinking the bike might get damaged if they kept riding (※)
they walked a few kilometers and hitched a ride back
with someone they knew.
※If the tire or rim isn't making contact with the frame and it's just barely grazing — like shoe rub — you can self-pedal just fine.
The spoke snapped inside the nipple while frozen in place.
When they took it to a nearby shop,
they were told that Mavic wheels have to be sent to the distributor (service center)
for repairs.
MTB suspension overhauls and repairs get sent to the service center as a matter of course,
but I've rarely heard of that for wheels.
Maybe Velomax and its successor Easton,
plus Shimano wheel rim replacement service — that's about it.
Since a race is coming up (next week),
the service center timeline wouldn't work,
so they weren't sure what to do.
Then three people they knew all mentioned our shop,
so they brought it in.
They said I could write about this, so:
the customer is from Shiga Prefecture.
After replacing the spoke and truing just that section,
I found two other spots with significant runout.
The image above shows the center offset at that rough truing point.
In the condition they brought it in, it was wobbling like a potato chip,
so I couldn't see the provisional center.
For workflow reasons I worked with an anti-freewheel-side tightening bias,
so the provisional center in the image above definitely has a slight mix of what I just did,
but it probably had nearly this much offset even before the spoke broke.
The customer also noticed there was radial runout.
That came from previous truing history.
Even though Mavic has slack wheel-building tolerances,
the radial runout exceeded the manufacturer's shipping spec.
By chasing down both radial and lateral runout,
I was able to dial it in from a state of center offset alone
to dead nuts.
The broken spoke and nipple were seized,
but many of the other spokes were pre-seized too.
↑Replaced spoke and nipple
The aluminum nipple fractured inside where it was seized.
With mild seizing, you could grab the nipple side with a nipple wrench
and grab the spoke head with pliers-type tools
to break the seizure and turn or remove them —
even if you're not putting the wheel back together.
But with this one, even that wasn't possible.
It's basically one solid lump.
Why do we have Mavic spare spokes in stock? It's because
Mavic dealers buy spare spokes in 10-piece bags,
but you only need one or two for a repair, and
there are plenty of crappy shops that force customers to buy
the whole 10-piece bag.
In those cases, we've been buying the unused spokes from customers.
Since spare spokes we get this way are limited to wheels that are common
and have common failure points,
when we get another Mavic wheel with issues in the same spot,
the odds are high — and we've gotten lucky helping people that way.
The Mavic distributor — while maybe not legally binding —
should issue a notice forbidding shops from forcing customers
to buy unnecessary spare spokes.
That this is tolerated is genuinely wrong.
If the distributor set up a feedback channel on their SNS like #forced_spoke_bulk_buys
and followed up on reports with fact-checking,
I think you could stamp it out pretty easily.