John Brandt who is the auther of the Bcycle wheel put up a good reason for reusing spokes.
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/reusing-spokes.html
Quote:
I just bent my wheel and am probably going to need a new one built. Can I reuse my old, 3 months, spokes in the new wheel. The guy at the shop gave me some mumbo jumbo about tensioning or something.
There is no reason why you should not reuse the spokes of your relatively new wheel. The reason a bike shop would not choose to do this is that they do not know the history of your spokes and do not want to risk their work on unknown materials. If you are satisfied that the spokes are good quality you should definitely use them for you new wheel. The spokes should, however, not be removed from the hub because they have all taken a set peculiar to their location, be that inside or outside spokes. The elbows of outside spokes, for instance, have an acute angle while the inside spokes are obtuse. There are a few restrictions to this method, such as that new rim must have the same effective diameter as the old, or the spokes will be the wrong length. The rim should also be the same "handedness" so that the rim holes are offset in the correct direction. This is not a fatal problem because you can advance the rim one hole so that there is a match. The only problem is that the stem will not fall between parallel spokes as it should for pumping convenience.
Take a cotton swab and dab a little oil in each spoke socket of the new rim before you begin. Hold the rims side by side so that the stem holes are aligned and note whether the rim holes are staggered in the same way. If not line the rim up so they are. Then unscrew one spoke at a time, put a wipe of oil on the threads and engage it in the new rim. When they are all in the new rim you proceed as you would truing any wheel. Details of this are in a good book on building wheels.
The reason you can reuse spokes is that their failure mode is fatigue. There is no other way of causing a fatigue failure than to ride many thousand miles (if your wheel is properly built). A crash does not induce fatigue nor does it even raise tension in spokes unless you get a pedal between them. Unless a spoke has a kink that cannot be straightened by hand, they can all be reused. |
more here
http://yarchive.net/bike/spoke_reuse.html
Quote:
From: jbrandt@hpl.hp.com (Jobst Brandt)
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.tech
Subject: Re: Spoke broke
Date: 14 Jan 1999 18:31:44 GMT
Doug (who?) writes:
>>> Why reuse spokes??They cost only about $10 for straight gauge-
>> Can you say, "Throw-away Society"? It is my personal philosophy to
>> reuse *anything* that can be (note; not to the point of sacrificing
>> safety), and spare the landfills.
> So do you drain the oil out of your car.., run it through a coffee
> filter and put it back in the car? Most things have a useful life
> and once spokes have been used (and stressed thousands of times)
> their useful life is over.
Not so. A good stainless spoke probably has a longer life than your
bicycling career. I have a pair of wheels that is well over 200000
miles old having had many rim replacements. Spokes are not stressed
to more than 1/3 their yield stress and therefore, do not fatigue age
with use. The reason they break, is that they have residual locked
in high stresses either from manufacture or installation or both,
that leave them near their yield stress locally.
Once a set of spokes has been stress relieved and is working well, you
do yourself a great disservice by throwing them away when rebuilding
with a new rim because you must go through the weeding out of spokes
that will break due to peculiarities that leave them with residual
stress. Even a crashed an folded wheel does not damage spokes if they
are not kinked because loads on wheels only reduce tension rather than
increase it. The slight increases that occur when a wheel is bent
sideways are insignificant to the strength of the spoke.
All this is not the case for Rolf or similarly low spoke count wheels
where individual spokes are far more highly stressed. You don't get
something for nothing.
Jobst Brandt <jbrandt@hpl.hp.com> |
I've reused spoke when just replacing a rim. I have over 10,000 miles on replaced wheel.
The choice is yours.
21st November 2009 
