Had one of those weeks where nothing went right in the stand

Tried to true a wheel from a customer's 1990s Trek mountain bike on Tuesday and the spoke nipples were so corroded three of them just snapped off. Then on Thursday I had a SRAM shifter cable snap inside the housing on a brand new bike, had to rip the whole bar tape off and start over. Has anyone else run into those old spoke nipples that basically disintegrate when you touch them?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sandra2d ago

Oh man, that sounds like a brutal week... I actually read somewhere that those old Trek wheels from the 90s used a weird mix of aluminum and steel in the nipples that just corrodes faster over time. Must be the humidity or something because I've seen people mention the same thing happening on coastal bikes. Hope the rest of your month goes smoother, those snapped cables are the worst.

ryan_flores1d ago

Yeah, "those old Trek wheels from the 90s" totally fits into this bigger thing I've noticed with older stuff in general. Like, I was cleaning out my dad's garage last summer and found his old fishing rods from the 80s. The metal guides on them had this same weird crusty corrosion that basically turned the metal into powder if you touched it. It's funny how we assume older stuff was built better, but sometimes it was just built with whatever cheap materials they had lying around. I feel like everything from that era had some weird alloy or plastic that just didn't hold up, like how old car radios get that sticky goo on the buttons. Anyway, glad you caught that about the Trek wheels, it makes me feel less crazy for noticing these patterns in random junk.