D
Deleted member 4366
Guest
I agree with most of what you wrote in the previous post. I think that you have the right idea, but seeing as they're breaking and causing a lot of dissatisfaction they are ipso facto bad quality. I think what you're trying to say is that cheap spokes are not necessarily bad quality. In China, some of the manufacturing facilities do not use proper quality controls, so the parameters of the materials that they use are variable. you can alter the characteristics of any steel by changing very slightly any of the ingredients or the heat treatment. With inadequate quality controls in the spoke making processes, it's also possible to change the material properties. The end result is that most cheap Chinese stainless spokes don't break, but some do. I know some manufacturers have had batches of bikes where everything is OK, then all of a sudden one batch starts to show breaking spokes. You can put the two side-by side and you can't see a difference, but somewhere there is a difference. It only takes the slightest blemish on the bending tool, and you can reduce the life of the bend by 1000%. Then there's the hardness of the material. Too hard, and the same result. There's so many possibilities. As a user, keeping your spokes adequately and evenly tensioned helps. If you don't tension loose spokes, some will surely beak, but if you do all that and they still break, time to start again with some new ones. I must admit that I'm a little suspicious about the repairs done to the wheel in question, because a rebuild with new spokes normally fixes it.
To finish, I'm 100kg, and I use my bike for everything, including carrying 20kg of shopping back from the supermarket, lots of rough off-road riding, jumping off curbs, etc, and sometimes all of those things at once. My cheap Chinese spokes don't break. My motor is the same as what they fit in some of the Neos.
