Catastrophic wheel failure.

I had a "perfectly good and true" wheel taco on me at the bottom of an intermediate whoop. Resulted in me doing a faceplant into the upside of the whoop. The rear wheel is fine to this day. I know wheels taco every now and then (hence the clever name for the occurance,) but its not an everyday thing.

sometimes its difficult to tell whether the wheels you get on a ready-made factory bike are any good....they may sport reconisable names like 'specialized' or 'mavic' but if the wheels were assembled in a factory they may not be built to such a high standard.

this may reduce the strength, reliability and life expectancy of a wheel.

unfortunately, if you are like 99% of serious cyclists, you wont know how to test for a quality wheel build, you just have to take your chances.

if the mechanic that trued your wheel was any good he would have spotted inconsitent spoke tensions and sorted the problem, i personally would take the wheel to him and have a stiff word.

neon said:

The other day I was riding down some local fire trail. I saw up ahead was a small branch across the track. So I did a little bunny hop over it. Next thing I know I'm flying over the handle bars and landing on the head and shoulder. :eek: Luckily the only thing that was broken was my helmet.

After taking a minute to compose myself, I saw what had cause me to become unstuck. My front wheel had buckle when I landed the bunny hop, causing the tyre to become jam into the forks, thus sending me over the handle bars.

Is this common thing to happen, it was not large bunny hop, maybe 150mm/13inches high? The wheel was specialized hub/mavic rim wheel that came with the bike, are these wheels no good? I just had my wheel true a week before this happen, could the bike mechanic loosen the spoke tension to much?

Sounds more like Catastrophic pilot error! :eek:
Time to slow down and see the wild flowers. 😄