Rims out of Round

Have your bike shop fix them for you.   They call this "Truing" the wheels.  They can fix most issues, but if there is a big bend or dent you might need a new rim or wheel.   Truing is usually about $10, so not too bad and worth getting fixed.    It's pretty normal to have your wheel get a little off after a season or two. 

I agree with tkbslc that trueing is sometimes necessary as I had to do it several times for my mtb when I was really into it. But the thing is, I've never had a problem up and down, only right and left. That's what's making it wierd for me, and I'm thinking it's the trainer as it's both in the front and rear wheel. I wonder if it's the wheels not holding up your weight (yet you don't look that heavy) or the roads you ride.

I knew you could true the rims if they were 'warped'...I guess the rims hitting the brake pads is the best example I could think of. I just wasn't sure if they could be trued the other way...like the rims are eliptical up and down for a lack of a better term.

Well, at 160 I doubt it's my weight. The only thing I can think of is that I must have hit a pot hole earlier in the year but I keep thinking that if I hit it that hard I would have flattened a tire. I've never seen this in rims before...I'm afraid that I'm looking at a new set of rims.

First remove your tires and tubes from the rims and make sure that the rims are bent. Mount them back in the frame and spin them while watching through the brake calipers. If they are bent out of round then find a "Qualified" mechanic in your local area who has wheel building experience and have him evaluate your wheels further. A bit of "hop" in a wheel is not that unusual and can be minimized by a decent wheel builder. Once the wheel is out of round it is doubtful that you will ever get it "perfect" again as the metal rim has actually stretched, but you should be able to get it pretty close. BTW 3mm is not really that bad, I would be inclined to live with that.

Scott

Thanks for all of the input! I can't feel it when riding the bike so maybe I'm just looking too closely at this. I'm hoping not to spend a lot of money either fixing or replacing the rims as this would cut into my wetsuit budget which would in turn cut into doing tri's in May/early June around here. I think I'm going to try and live with it for a while.

NO you are not looking at it to closely. If it's not round, it's not round. It doesn't sound like it's dishing problem as previous poster mentioned. Dishing refers to the relationship of the hub to the rim in a left/right direction...it must be centered and take into account the space that teh casette takes up. IT woudl be extremely unlikely the dishign would be messed up unless every other spoke simultaeously tighted or loosened.

Look at your spokes at the rim and notice how every other spoke goes to teh same side of the hub. One goes to the right, next to the left, next to the right, etc,etc. It's easy to see that if a single spoke became a little loose, that this would decrease the "pulling" force that spoke provides in it's direction, thus causing the wheel to have a little wobble in the opposite direction. This is what happens most of the time when a wheel needs to be trued.

Now imagine if two or even three spokes next to each other all loosened a little. The left to right loss of pulling forces would have an equal loss, so it wouldn't wobble side to side, but since there is less tension provided on the rim, you might get a hop in the wheel instead.

This is exactly what happened to my wheel this month. I only noticed it on the trainer. I trued it up, made it look good, but I still heard the thump every time that spot came around on the wheel. I took it to my bike shop and for $10, they looked at it. Turns out I had trued it just fine but I wanted a professional to check it out.

You don't have to be a wheel builder to true a wheel, although a wheel builder would to a quick and speedy job of it. As a college student, I worked in the local bike shop building bikes out of their boxes for floor display ($5 per bike), and I trued every single factory wheel by hand, so I got pretty good at it. I've still never built a wheel, that's a project for this winter for mysingle speed!

it is possible that you have a broken spoke too!