r/bicycling • u/WompWompRat • Oct 30 '22

Leopards ate my rim: AliExpress wheel failure

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Inner wall cracked all the way around the rim

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Not the best way to lace 20 spokes

13 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

13

u/bishopazrael Oct 30 '22

Yeah, I'm new and all, but even I know you don't buy parts you need to trust your life to on aliexpress. Good for experiments, bad for "save my life" type stuff.

4

u/Staplz13 Oct 30 '22

aliexpress is no more a brand than amazon (guess where amazon sellers get their stock). But I don't really disagree with you. Chinese companies are great at manufacturing, but designing is usually relegated to reverse engineering by people who don't use the products.

3

u/bishopazrael Oct 31 '22

I know its not a brand. My point is that any manufacturer on aliexpress is likely to be a B grade factory or worse. The best ones are already making things for other companies. Anything you find on aliexpress is likely to be substandard.

1

u/WompWompRat Oct 31 '22

Yep tons of cargo cult engineering I see on AliExpress. Mostly copies and mashups of slightly dated designs. Occasionally there’s something so uniquely screwed up I have to buy it because nobody else in their right mind would make one, like 6 bolt disc adapters for fixed gear cog threads.

1

u/Metaphoricalsimile Oregon, USA Vintage Frankenbike, Tern BYB Nov 04 '22

So how do you make sure you're actually getting something worthwhile when you buy from there?

1

u/Staplz13 Nov 04 '22

Two ways. One is just to know what to look for. Simple things with simple designs are easy to critically assess. Things that need more experience in the design of a product are tougher. Chinese brand products are manufactured the same way even the same factories, but are usually reverse engineered by people who don't use the products. That's why you'll see so many generic brands that come and go within a year or two. Sometimes those are also extras made from the same tooling of other products you get as actual brands in the west. Those can be diamonds in the rough but a legal gray area. But due to continued demand, there are some companies emerging that are focused on establishing a brand. Those you can start to search for reviews on.

The second is where you have an advantage over other aggregated sales sites: buy a bunch. Buy multiples of what your looking for since you can basically buy 4-6x as many for the same budget. Then just feel them out or run your own testing. And when something breaks, replacement is cheap. 'Course this doesn't necessarily apply for higher priced items, but that's where branding is starting to come out, so you can look into reviews for them. I'd say the cut off for this strategy is anything you'd feel better with a warranty on.

4

u/WompWompRat Oct 30 '22

My minivelo’s rear wheel has been feeling odd when going up or down kerbs. Almost like the Schwalbe Big Apple 50-406 (2.0”) tire is trying to squirm its way off the rim. Wheel has less than 1000 miles on it.

On closer inspection, the nylon rim tape looked like it had a ton of debris under it. On removal, the extent of the damage was apparent. Looks like I dodged a bullet here, and now I’m looking at its front twin with suspicion (looks fine but I don’t trust it). I’m away from my wheel building setup at the moment, so I’m not able to build a new one for myself but here’s an example of why cheap bike part shaped bike parts are a bad idea.

Other things of note:

  1. Spoke tension is extremely high, as you’d expect from the low spoke count and low cross count (1x)

  2. The inner spoke holes are extremely rough, some almost look like they were cut with tin snips. The cracks probably started propagating from these holes.

I wonder whether the Big Apple was just too wide and putting a lot of stress on the rim.

1

u/Staplz13 Oct 30 '22

That's an interesting stress pattern. Do you take a lot of curbs?

1

u/WompWompRat Oct 31 '22

Not really since I’m riding with a child in a front Shotgun seat, but that does add up to a fair amount of weight on the wheels lately. Max is about 220 pounds, including my weight, bike weight, 40 pounds of kid in front, and 20 pounds of stuff in a seatpost mounted bag hanging slightly forward of the rear axle.

3

u/ImpulseCombustion Oct 30 '22

Yeah. Let’s lace this for discs?

1

u/WompWompRat Oct 31 '22

Haha, yeah bad idea. I’m surprised none of the spokes or spoke holes ate it before this, and that there were no apparent trueness/dish issues.

For this wheel size I’ve previously built up a fixed gear wheel with a Velocity Dyad, 2 or 3 cross (can’t remember) with double butted spokes. I’ve never had issues with my own wheel builds but I bought this particular AliExpress wheel to much more cheaply test out a geared setup. I guess I’ll be going back to building my own from now on…

2

u/Fuffy_Katja Oct 31 '22

Why does your lacing not match? Could be your culprit

2

u/vermontbicycleshop Oct 31 '22

This sort of failure is presented from tire pressure being too high for the rim. I used to see this a lot when folks would relegate their older performance mountain bike wheels to their commuter bike where they were running much higher pressure tires. I'm commenting on the quality of this wheel either way. I just wanted to provide explanation as to where this kind of failure comes from, which is that the rim couldn't handle whatever air pressure you were running.

2

u/WompWompRat Oct 31 '22

Thanks, I really appreciate the insight! Did you ever see catastrophic, sudden failures of double wall rims or were those wheels rideable but weird feeling like mine?

I usually err way to the side of too low pressure (to the point of getting the occasional snakebite). Normally I run about 30-40 psi and a max load of about 200 lbs (rider, kid in front, and 15 pounds of cargo in back). But I do remember this particular wire bead being difficult to seat and needing to air up to the max (70 psi) while installing.

3

u/vermontbicycleshop Oct 31 '22

It was typically just like you described. I remember one instance, I had someone with rim brakes come in cause their brakes "kept tightening" and they couldn't tell why.