Originally Posted by
Noahma
The wheels have 3900 miles on them so far. I have had to have the rear trued at least once per year. The roads and MUPS I tend to stick to are generally in pretty good condition so they are certainly not abused lol. I will see what my mechanic will do. I weigh a shade over 180 lbs.
Find a builder and not a shop mechanic. Shop mechanics know absolute f-all about actually tensioning and truing a wheel. They just twist nipples until it's "straight enough". I fix more immensely un-tension balanced wheels than I care to admit. "Did you have someone work on these wheels?" ... "uh....yeah. I took them to a shop to be trued. Then they kept coming out of true and I had to keep taking them back."
Originally Posted by
nycphotography
when truing wheels, the trick is that they also have to be properly tensioned. a lot people will just add tension to pull them straight. a couple iterations of that, and they're ticking time bombs.
This.
Originally Posted by
cthenn
That's an extremely common failure mode of an aluminum rim, and may have nothing to do with spoke tension.
Common failure mode? Correct. Nothing to do with spoke tension? Categorically incorrect.
A crap rim will exasperate failure. Material too thin around the spoke holes, poor design (Pacenti rims sl23s as an example), inconsistent extrusion, etc. The rim itself doesn't just assplode. It fails under tension form the spoke. This failure is always caused by spoke tension. Meaning the tension from the spoke is what leads to the plastic deformation and catastrophic failure of the rim.
What people aren't articulating is that this failure can happen even when the spoke is at the "correct" tension. I will go out on a limb and assume they are smart enough to understand that it doesn't always mean the tension was too high and they just incorrectly explained that as meaning it has NOTHING to do with spoke tension. Example: just about every Bontrager paired spoke rim ever. Tensions could be well within acceptable range and yet it was simply a matter of time before they crack. Combination of poor design leading to too high of a localized stress concentration on the rim. Rims needed to be thicker and/or spokes needed to be further apart. The fatigue failure was always going to happen even at low tensions. It was just a matter of how many loading cycles it would take.
Of course you don't have to take my word for it. If you did then this wouldn't be a public forum. I will simply just keep coming back and pointing my finger if I have the time that is.
OP - your rim failed. Could be that the wheel was taken up to too high of a tension accelerating the failure of the rim or it could be it's a crap rim or a poor design but the tension on the spoke and the loading cycles eventually led to a fatigue failure localized around the stress concentration that the hole in the rim creates.
Fun. Happy Friday.