11-07-2023, 03:50 PM
Rim cracks are still mysterious to me.
I never had to deal with one yet, but I would imagine it's due to poor maintenance and truing schematic over years in most cases, rather than the material. When you take your wheel to bike shops to have them trued, often they will only true them lateral and will not true them radial. Overtime, this would cause the wheel to become crazy tension webbed. Where wheels will already have certain spokes with a little more tension than others—this becomes accentuated terribly—and the strain on that part of the rim will increase exponentially.
If you really wanted to narrow it down to quality, you would need to know the brand of the bike for a better idea of what the cost of production likely was (and thus, the range of quality in the materials used/purchased). I honestly don't find that top companies use any components at all that are low quality. The rims are always very strong, double walled, 6061 T6 aluminum. The larger the wheel, more prone it becomes to flex, because of the distance factor involved. Even so, it's not easy to bust a double wall high grade aluminum rim this way. One should always consider sabotage in these cases also, where a person vandalizes their own components in attempts to cash in on any warranty benefits.
I never had to deal with one yet, but I would imagine it's due to poor maintenance and truing schematic over years in most cases, rather than the material. When you take your wheel to bike shops to have them trued, often they will only true them lateral and will not true them radial. Overtime, this would cause the wheel to become crazy tension webbed. Where wheels will already have certain spokes with a little more tension than others—this becomes accentuated terribly—and the strain on that part of the rim will increase exponentially.
If you really wanted to narrow it down to quality, you would need to know the brand of the bike for a better idea of what the cost of production likely was (and thus, the range of quality in the materials used/purchased). I honestly don't find that top companies use any components at all that are low quality. The rims are always very strong, double walled, 6061 T6 aluminum. The larger the wheel, more prone it becomes to flex, because of the distance factor involved. Even so, it's not easy to bust a double wall high grade aluminum rim this way. One should always consider sabotage in these cases also, where a person vandalizes their own components in attempts to cash in on any warranty benefits.
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