How I suddenly came to own a bike with 32-spoke wheels

So, my bike has already had the wheels trued once, at 1100 miles. And the past week, it started to feel a little wobbly. Today, I called Performance Bike, seeing if I could get it brought back to true, but they wouldn’t be able to do it until next Thursday.

Today, the bike felt a little awkward while riding and was making a bit of noise. So at lunch, I put it upside down and spotted that the rear wheel was pretty far out of round. So I took it into Sports Basement, who is the best at being open while I am riding home to have them take a peek and tell me that it needed to be done. And he agreed that the wheels were out of true, the rear wheel especially.

The key question I had was “You know, the bike has 2,000 miles and the wheels have been trued once and the most I’ve done with the wheels is ride on dirt and gravel and hopping off the curb, is it that my wheels suck?”

And the answer was that the rims were probably not the greatest rims and the wheel was probably machine built and that they hadn’t done the greatest of jobs truing it the first time. So it’s better, at least with respect to the back tire, to just rebuild it right.

At some point, he took a closer look and realized that four of the spokes had broken. So I was riding on a wheel with 32 spokes and it wasn’t any biggie.

So I’ve got a new rear wheel being built. I decided to go with a totally silver wheel this time around with the silver Sun Rhyno Lite rims and silver spokes. It turns out that people who want rational bike wheels get shafted, as usual. It’s fairly hard to find sturdy rims that have 36 spokes and also take rim brakes. Everybody’s making disc-brake-only rims these days, which is just pure suck.

There was a funny conversation had with a girl who was being dragged along to the bike store. She was of the opinion that they could make cars that would run on water, they just don’t want to. I told her that even if cars ran on water, it doesn’t change what’s wrong with cars… the traffic, being separated from nature, getting exercise, etc. She told me there was a spark of joy in me when I talked about why I love to cycle… and she’s probably right. I didn’t intend to go through such a religious conversion by biking to work, but I have.

The front wheel, I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to do. I can either have the guy at the store do it, or I can do it myself. I’ve been meaning to get more self-sufficient in my cycling habits, especially given that wheelsmithing is approaching the level of a lost art and wheel problems are also one of the popular things to have go wrong while on a long ride. Or I can just leave it alone for the time being, given that it’s strong. Or I can get a better front hub (whatever difference that may make) and end up with a spare lesser wheel and a nice newer handmade wheel.


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