Please recommend me a 26 inch rear wheel.

[gentlegreen]

I'm heavy and I carry a lot of stuff on rough roads, so my daily transport for the past 12 years has been a Giant alloy mountain bike.
For some years now I have had wheels based on the Mavic 721 rim - which unfortunately wears incredibly quickly with rim brakes - 12 months - 2,000 miles - so quickly that I've only recently learned that I need to service wheel bearings once a year.

A couple of years ago I had some new wheels built on XT hubs and fitted a cable disc brake on the rear .. so I thought I'd finally got something that would last.
A couple of months ago I realised the rear wheel had loose spokes and was going out of true so I took it to the local bike shop.

I now see that the rim is cracking up.

Clearly it could be due to me leaving it too long to be trued and perhaps the spokes were over-tightened, but this doesn't seem reasonable to me.

I've had just over two years and 4,000 miles out of this wheel.

[Brucey]

Mavic specify certain spoke tensions for their rims. Sadly you can't build good wheels using their specs! The spoke tension was almost certainly higher than recommended, but then it needs to be if the wheel isn't going to fail in other ways.

If that is a fairly lightweight double-walled rim on a derailleur geared wheel (i.e. with heavy dish) then that kind of damage is fairly commonplace.

High spoke tension, light rim, stainless eyelets, add salt water= recipe for cracking.

If you want a rim that isn't so likely to crack, I'd suggest buying a much heavier one, preferably in a softer material. Build it up using DB spokes and with less dish (do you need all those gears...?)

cheers

[531colin]

Errr...
that rim isn't just a bit familiar, is it?....http://forum.ctc.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=40617&hilit=twins

[reohn2]

One word.Sputnik.

[bikerwaser]

i have rigida grizzly´s on my Thorn Sherpa. they´re built very well and despite being very strong and designed for touring they´re quite light and fast.
Thorn build them and fit them on their standard Sherpa bike build with DT swiss spokes on Deore hubs.

here´s their pdf of the Sherpa where you can scroll down to the wheel section and read their blurb.

http://www.sjscycles.com/thornpdf/Thorn ... oLoRes.pdf

i´ve clocked 7000 miles on them so far with much of those miles being on tour with average of 45 kgs plus my 80kg

as you can see i´m on tour at the moment , having done 1200 miles down to Spain . wheels are as true and as good as day one.

http://biker-waser.blogspot.co.uk/

[gentlegreen]

Thanks all.

I've gone for a Spa Cycles 36 spoke Sputnik on an XT hub.
Philosophically with only one bike, I needed a spare wheel with a disc mount in any case- and I think the Sputnik rim comes in a 32 hole version to suit my current hub.
I think I'll let my local wheel builder fit it- I think what may finally have finished the Mavic off was limping home on an under-inflated tyre.