Quote Originally Posted by DebW
She won't bite me. I have a 12 inch crescent wrench and some sharp cable cutters (they cut spokes too).
Since I posted that, I've been trying to estimate how may spokes I've cut in my lifetime. If I built 5 wheels per week for 15 weeks per year for 4 years, that's 300 wheels, and each wheel had 36 spokes, that's 1080 spokes. And cutting one wheel's worth of spokes was almost enough to give me tendonitis. The fun part was cutting the first half dozen spokes, which are under so much tension that they can fly across a room when you cut them. To be safe, we'd stand the wheel on top of a trash can and cut the lower spokes first.

My estimate of the number of exploding tires I've experienced is 400-500. I'm surprised I don't have hearing loss from that. Less than 5 of those were tires I was riding on, and most of them probably failed stitching in patched sewups.