All Maintenance Tasks · Monthly
Check Wheel Trueness and Spokes
A wheel holds its shape because every spoke is pulling against every other one. Lose the tension in one and its neighbors take up the slack unevenly, the rim drifts sideways, and the wheel gets weaker at exactly the spot that is already bending. Caught early it is a small adjustment. Ignored, it ends as a taco-shaped rim on the side of the road.
Interval
Monthly
Once a month, or after roughly 200 miles
Time on the job
10 minutes
Once you have done it a few times.
You or a shop
Shop work if unsure
The stop signs further down are the real answer.
Applies toRoadMTBHybridE-bikeKids
How often, really
Monthly for most riders. Sooner if you have hit a pothole hard enough to make a noise, ride loaded with panniers, weigh more than the wheel was specified around, or ride a hub-motor e-bike. New wheels and freshly rebuilt wheels settle in their first few hundred miles and deserve a check early rather than on schedule.
The interval on this page is Monthly. Once a month, or after roughly 200 miles.
What you need
- A spoke wrench sized to your nipples
- A stand, or a way to spin the wheel freely
- A zip tie or a screwdriver as a fixed reference point
Doing the job
Spin the wheel and watch a fixed point
Lift the wheel off the ground and spin it. Watch the gap between the rim and a brake pad, or hold a screwdriver against the frame close to the rim as a reference. A rim that wanders side to side as it passes has a lateral wobble; a rim that rises and falls has a hop. Note where the movement is worst.
Squeeze the spokes in pairs
Take two adjacent spokes on the same side in one hand and squeeze them together, then work your way around the wheel. They should all feel similar. One pair that gives noticeably more than the rest is your loose spoke, and it will usually be right at the spot where you saw the wobble.
Listen to them
Pluck each spoke like a string. Spokes on the same side of the same wheel should ring at close to the same pitch. A dull thud among a set of clear notes is a spoke with almost no tension. The two sides of a rear wheel will not match each other, and that is normal.
Look for the damage that caused it
Check where each spoke enters the rim for cracks around the eyelet, and check the elbow where the spoke enters the hub flange for a shiny worn spot or a hairline crack. A spoke that broke at the elbow is often a sign that others are close behind it.
Check the rim itself
Look along the braking surface on a rim-brake wheel for a hollow, a crack or a vanished wear indicator. On any wheel, look for a flat spot, a dent in the sidewall, or a section where the rim has been pushed out at the bead. A damaged rim is not corrected by tensioning spokes.
Know what you can do and what you cannot
Bringing one loose spoke back to match its neighbors, in quarter-turn steps of the nipple with the wheel spinning as you go, is a reasonable home job if you already have a spoke wrench of the right size. Truing a wheel that is genuinely out of shape, correcting dish, or replacing a spoke on a wheel with high tension is a shop job with a tension meter and a truing stand.
Stop and take it to a shop
If any of this shows up while you work on check wheel trueness and spokes, put the bike down and let a mechanic look at it. None of these are things to ride out and see how it goes.
- A broken spoke. Do not ride the wheel, even gently; the remaining spokes are now carrying an uneven load and the rim goes out of shape quickly. Take it to a shop.
- A crack anywhere in the rim, at a spoke hole, at the seam, or across the braking surface. Rim failure at speed is not something to manage.
- A wheel that will not come true, comes back out of true within a week, or needs constant retensioning. Something structural is wrong and adding tension hides it rather than fixing it.
- Any wheel on a hub-motor e-bike with a loose or broken spoke. Take it to a dealer who works on that motor rather than to a general truing stand.
Where this usually goes wrong
- Turning a spoke nipple a full turn at a time. Wheel truing works in quarter turns, and a full turn moves the rim further than the problem you were correcting.
- Tightening the spoke nearest the wobble without checking whether the wheel is being pulled sideways or the rim is dented, which are opposite problems.
- Using the wrong size spoke wrench. It rounds off the nipple, and a rounded nipple turns a ten-minute adjustment into a rebuild.