please check your rims

[hellosunshine]

because my front wheel collapsed on me,twang!bang and the rim came apart on a silver slivver,result of worn winter wheels- was lucky was uphill,but DO CHECK YOUR RIMS TONIGHT!im used to checking brakes/gears etc in winter,but rims i never thought of.

[DebW]

Can you post a picture of the collapsed rim? Rim type? Number of spokes? Single or double wall? How many years of use did the rim have? Did it fail on the sidewall from brake friction or at the spoke eyelets? I've only seen one collapsed rim, and it was quite old.

[Eden]

What a coincidence - I blew up a rim last Friday! We've had a fairly nasty winter around here (at least for the area.....) so there have been several times when road crews put sand on the roads and none of it has been cleaned up. Its been particularly punishing on the old rain bike even though I clean it off every time I go out in the wet - you may as well be using sand paper and rubbing compound to brake with! I was noticing the rims were looking worn and I even took them down to the shop a couple weeks ago and he thought I had about 6 months left in them.......

Well - luckily enough I was on a trainer at the time it went (it was the rear for me), unluckily I was in the middle of my VO2max test..... when about 1/4 of my rear rim when flying across the room, accompanied by a rather loud bang. Also fortunately for me I had just recieved my new rims that I got off of Ebay about 3 days earlier - cause my rainbike takes 650's and I didn't have any spares before that.

I can't post any photos since its already at the shop being rebuilt, but I can tell you it was a Velocity Deep V, 28 spokes and it was the braking surface of the rim that failed. It folded right over everywhere that it didn't completely blow out on one side. I don't know how old the rims were, though I don't think more than a few years if that - they had been on a used TT bike that I purchased last summer from a triathelete (and you just don't do a lot of heavy braking when you are doing tri's) and they were in pretty good condition then. When I took it down to the shop he thought one of the brake pads must have worn to the metal, but I know that never happened - in any case they are cartridge pads so they don't have a metal post or a bolt to stick out in the middle.

[RoadRaven]

Thanks for this reminder

I hardly ever glance at my rims, though I almost always run my hand over each tyre and always lean on the tires to see if they need more air... won't take much to look at the rims as well!

[Velobambina]

Question from a dummy: how can you tell if your rims are going bad?

[DebW]

This is something you never saw 30 years ago, but now rims are lighter and tire pressures are higher, so I can see where they'd fail that way. Yet another advantage of sew-ups - sew-up rims don't take air pressure stress from the tires/tubes. If one failed, the rim sidewall could collapse by 1/2" but the tire would stay in place and remain fully inflated.

eden or hellosunshine, did you notice the rim expanding (maybe the brakes needing to be loosened) before the rim failed?