FBinNY 

There's always been debate on the issue of spoke tension as it relates to spoke breakage.

I'm doing some research on the subject and realize there's helpful empirical evidence based on the large pool of failures and the tension difference in dished rear wheels.

So, this is both for people who've personally experienced spoke breakage, and for mechanics who've seen plenty of it.

Please answer ONLY based on personal experience or observation, based on single instances, or based on a significant difference in frequency. The "both" is for when neither is materially more common.

Note also, please report only elbow failures, excluding spokes that broke for other reasons, ie. a stick jammed into the wheel, spokes notched by chain, etc.

Thanks,
FB


BTW, later I may try a similar survey based on elbow in or out, or "pulling" vs. "pushing"

sweeks

I said "both", but was unable to comment that these spokes were on un-dished rear wheels with internally geared hubs.

Kontact 

I don't know if you'll get good data if people report on the rim end failures that are common with some popular carbon wheels. I think those have a specific failure mode.

Troul 

always the ds spoke & at the hub never at the nipple or along the straight.

79pmooney

(I tried surveying my broken spokes but none were willing to go on record. They all stayed mum.)

Derailleur bikes - right rear by a small margin. (I go a step higher on gauge right-rear.) My fix gear wheels break spokes so seldom that I don't track them. Number one spoke killer - the second rim replacement. Over the life of that (third) rim, I usual replace 1-3 spokes. Number two - dropping the chain inside the cassette or FW. That's usually 3-4 spokes (actually breaking later) per incident. Then miscellaneous failures - random, poor wheel builds, events ...

I didn't vote because this is sorta hard to sum up in one box.

FBinNY 

Since this is strictly about elbow failure, rim end failures shouldn't be included, and I don't expect them to be.

In any case, since those wheels are so few in number. I doubt any error introduced that way would be significant.

FWIW, I'm not looking for precision because there are too many variables. The only conclusions would be either overwhelmingly one way or the other, or too close to call.

Dean51 

I cast my ballot for drive side only. These were all rear wheels that had suffered spoke damage near the hub from chains that had derailed to the inside.

Dean

TiHabanero

Damage from dropping a chain is likely outside the parameters of this survey since he specified elbow failures on dished wheels.

FBinNY 

To be fair, I added that in response to his post.

In any case, failure from all other causes combined are probably a small enough factor not to matter.

Crankycrank

As of this post I see I'm the only vote for NDS breakage at the elbow. I found all NDS spokes were wiggly loose when 2 of them broke. This was a friends bike so I have no idea how long the spokes were loose or if that had anything to do with it and there was no visible damage to any of the spokes or rim.

unterhausen

I think elbow failures are almost all NDS. That's true in my case. I also had some elbow failures on a front wheel, likely due to low tension. I used to ignore tension on wheels I bought from other people, that's unwise

I had mentioned some DS failures at the head, and I think that is common on DS failures, not just in my experience. I'm pretty sure the spokes I had break at the head were due to swaging failures, there were three ridges in line with where a swaging die would have been. Suggests that the dies were worn out.

Steve B.

Spokes I’ve had fail were always drive side. It’s also been 15-20 years since I’ve had a broken spoke. Mostly as I learned to look for issues and will fix obvious truing problems that show up. As well, wheels have gotten much stronger, my 2 mt bikes have factory built Specialized wheels, 28 spoke, that just hold up very well and I’m a clyde so have never been easy on wheel. My Ibis carbon wheel has also been super reliable over a years use. Also a 28 spoke wheel.

wheelreason

Going from memory, about 80% of spoke replacements require the cassette or freewheel removed to complete.

Bill Kapaun

I didn't vote because you said elbow.

My own experience is a wheel I built around Dec. 2012.
I just recently popped off the head of a 2nd DS spoke.
I sent you a pic about 6-7? years ago when I did the 1st.
I did run into an old fashioned storm sewer grate and dropped the rear wheel in it HARD. Enough to distort the rim slightly. (the kind you'd make worse trying to fix)

Impersonal experience was a DS on a bike I picked up back when I flipped bikes. ALL the spokes were excessively loose. I replaced w/ all new since it was going to a friend.

Alan K

So I take it that those of us who have been unusually lucky (or exceptionally careful) to not have a spoke failure, need not bother participating - such a category is missing in the options.

shelbyfv

Yep, but I'll bet you can find another thread to post in.

Andrew R Stewart 

My answer is behind door #3. But the "roughly equally" isn't the comment I would have made.

Back in "the day" (the 1970s through the early 1980s) I saw more drive side elbows break. This changed to more and more non drive side breaking and I feel comfy saying that since the 1990s more NDS elbows are breaking. I attribute this to a few factors: more highly dished wheels with more and more cogs coming to market, the reduction of the spoke counts, machine built and tensioned wheels becoming the low cost standard, and now disk brakes and front wheels seeing far more broken spokes that just a decade ago. Andy

zandoval 

Right Drive Side for sure.

But really I never had spoke problems till I got over 240 pounds and started riding "Ravel Roads".

I still have wheel sets that have steel rims and spokes perfectly tensioned and aligned for more then 30 years of use. But with aluminum rims and other then 14ga spokes I have had problems. Even now after switching out my spokes to better quality 14g spokes with aluminum rims I still have to keep carefully attention to my wheel sets. Especially the rear.

Its nice to know that if I were going to go deep and do "Gravel Roads" instead of "Ravel Roads" I could just switch to one of my old steel wheel sets.

Truly having multiple exchangeable wheels sets has given me a big advantage on the slow back roads I ride...

Trakhak

When I was working in a bike store in New Haven, CT, I got a call from the guy who ran the nearby Branford Bike shop asking what spoke breakage patterns we'd observed on rear wheels. Jobst Brandt's The Bicycle Wheel book had recently come out, and the Branford Bike guy (whose name I've forgotten; this was years before he became a major Campagnolo importer) was up in arms, insisting that Brandt's claim that NDS spokes broke more frequently than DS spokes was wrong. He was thus surveying local shops for their input before confronting Brandt.

I've forgotten what I told him, but in retrospect, Brandt's point about rear wheel spoke breakage being predominantly a consequence of undertensioning rather than overtensioning those spokes was a surprise and a revelation. I suspect that back then, when none of us had any way to compare levels of spoke tension other than squeezing pairs of spokes and guessing, most rear wheels were significantly undertensioned.

In fact, the main cause of DS spoke breakage was probably that many of those (severely) undertensioned rear wheels had the NDS spokes so slack that the swing of tension in those was very limited, from close to zero to effectively zero, leaving the DS spokes, the tension of which would have been only a bit higher, bearing the brunt of the work of supporting the rim, and constantly swinging wildly from low to significantly higher tension.

pdlamb

NDS IME.

Without this caveat, my experience is about equal; driving that was one suicidal derailer that notched all the drive-side spokes.

With your limiter, I think I can recall a couple DS failures. But that's outweighed by numerous NDS failures. I've had spokes on new wheels fail in only 450 miles because they weren't adequately tensioned (one each ds and NDS, took a while for mail-ordered spokes to arrive). NDS fails rarely on properly tensioned wheels, vs. (almost) never on DS.

I've learned to check wheels in late winter/early spring while I'm repacking bearings. Most spoke failures in the last dozen years (since I bought a tensiometer) happen after a hard winter's commuting, when fresh potholes have a chance to loosen spokes a bit, which then unscrew until cyclical stress will pop them. Note it'll sometimes break at the base of the thread near the nipple, but 5X to 10X higher frequency is at the bend.

Rick_D

Likely to start with a break on the drive side (always love the extra labor to fix) that often then propagates to the adjacent spokes, which are de facto non drive side. My presumption is those are weakened from extra stress before the broken spoke is replaced. Can think of at least three bikes that needed wheel rebuilds after spoke breakage became chronic. Can't give any meaningful statistical input beyond than front vs. rear.

zandoval 

I have to admit that after getting a generic Spoke Tension device I am adjusting my spokes more often and having much less breakage.

Before I just used the Squeeze and ping technique and now I realizes the spoke tension meter gives me a much better ilia of what going on.

grumpus

I think I break most spokes at the thread by trying to true a wheel with seized nipples, elbow failures are rare outside of chain drop cases.

Dan Burkhart 

Interesting topic for a study.
My business has morphed into almost exclusively wheel building and repairs. My clientele includes three high end road shops, so I see lots of failures and may be uniquely positioned to provide data.
I should start keeping records of the nature of these failures because if I want to remember something, I have to write it down or otherwise record it. (I'm sure any of you who are in your 8th decade like me can relate.)
Many of these failures fall outside the parameters you have laid out, such as crash damage or spokes taken out by derailleurs etc, but I still see lots of elbow failures resulting from fatigue.
Off hand, I would say these failures are approximately equal for drive and non drive rear, and same for front whether disc or not.
The flood gates will open in a couple of months and I'm sure there will be lots of data to gather, so I WILL start keeping a record.

Spoonrobot 

From the incredible coincidences file: I voted in this poll on the 26th and a day later broke my first DS spoke since I started keeping track of such things back in 2011.