Current Projects chat and miscellany

Tension seems fine and the rust is cleaning off better than expected with 2mins work. Think they'll do til I can afford a rebuild. Hopefully they'll break one at a time, not all at once.

If the spokes look brown, you're in luck. Back in the olden days, we had 3 choices of spoke material

1. Stainless - prone to fatigue, because we didn't have the advanced metallurgy which has given us one of the great hidden advances in cycling in the past few decades, stainless spokes which actually work

2. Chrome plated - good steel, but the plating always flaked off because it's more brittle than the underlying steel, which elongates elastically about 0.3% when tensioned

3. "Rustless" - not pretty, but it's a kind of weathering steel which was actually the best we had until good stainless steels turned up. This is probably what you have. Not as strong and fatigue resistant as modern stainless steels, but my dad still rides to the shops on wheels I had built in the early 80s with rustless spokes