I appreciate that a lot’s going to depend on usage, but given that aluminium has a limited fatigue life is there a general rule of thumb for replacing wheels (rims) or is it just a case of checking for cracks/damage and replacing when any’s found?

In one word yes.

I have a wheel that is over 10 years old and still going strong, I have also had wheels that have only lasted 6 months.
It’s all down to usage, maintenance and luck that you bought a wheel with well manufactured components.

I find that after about 2 years they go a bit floppy and no amount of re-tensioning saves them.

Road bike ones however, they go on forever.

I’ve got a Merlin Hope XC/Mavic 717 wheel that’s 10 years old, had one bearing change and never seen a spoke key. it’s done thousands of miles.

I think it’s down to how the wheel is built and how you ride, tbh.

The quality of the build is very important. A pair of well hand-built wheels should last you a lot of years unless you’re doing silly things on them. Using decent double-butted spokes and a nice high even tension makes for a very resilient wheel. If you’ve got disc brakes, the wheels should last decades if you look after them.

However, if you’ve got cheap machine-built wheels, plain gauge spokes and / or low spoke tension, the wheels will get wobbly and start breaking spokes surprisingly quickly. I’m amazed how many manufacturers skimp on the quality of the wheels they sell with their bikes, even some fairly high-end ones.

There’s an awful lot more rant I could go into here, but I won’t…

I’ve got a Merlin Hope XC/Mavic 717 wheel that’s 10 years old

You don’t ride far/hard enough clearly :p The wheels on my touring bike were last looked at sympatheticaly with a spoke key in the 80’s.

My XC’s eat bearings every 2 years, but are now on their third set of rims. The previous build was done by someone who knew what they were doing, the latest one was DIY so we’ll see! People are too quick to jump on the bandwagon and call shimano/mavic/DT crap because they’re not built by a bespectacled old man with a beared in a dark shed who you can only contact on the fith tuesday of the month and has to decide whether he want’s to build wheels for you.

I don’t call Shimano / Mavic / DT crap, but I’d definitely say that a good hand-built wheel will usually outlast a factory wheel. By “machine-built” I meant the cheap ones that come on most bikes below about £1000 (and shockingly many above that amount) that are laced and tensioned by wheel-building robots. They’ve usually got plain-gauge spokes and they’re not usually built up to a decent spoke tension. As you increase the tension, the wheel becomes harder to true, so it’s obviously cheaper to leave them slack and straight.

On a slightly separate note, I’m not a huge fan of low spoke count wheels because most people seem to think that there’s no penalty for using fewer spokes in order to save weight. A lot of my customers are commuters and many are surprised how soon they break spokes on cheap lightweight wheels. Decreasing the number of spokes means increasing the forces upon each spoke. With cheap plain-gauge spokes this means significantly increasing the amplitude of the force cycles at the spoke elbow, which shortens the spoke’s lifespan dramatically.

So, Shimano / Mavic / DT wheels are good because they’re light. But they won’t be as strong and resilient as hand-built wheels from a decent builder.

Hmmmm, the wheels from my 01 Stumpy FSR are still going strong and are now used on my HT. The hubs have never had a service, although they have had a new spoke after I snapped one in Spain in a fall.
I should service the hubs (they are very rumbly) but I kinda think it’s best to just leave them be. I am pretty sure that if I open them up they will just die & that will be the end of them……

Shimano (and presumably others) finish theirs by hand, whereas stuff like superstar you hear about allsorts of problems from the wheel going out of true quickly to spokes being fitted in completely the wrong place.

IIRC Norco build theirs by hand as they found it faster and cheeper with less errors than the machine they bought to do it.

You can get badly built OEM handbuilts and badly built OEM machine builds. Aftermarket you get what you pay for, although I’d agree that arround £250 buys a lot more handbuilt than it does machine built. But I doub’t at the higher end that DT & Mavic could get away with shody builds.

The principle advantage of handbuilts to me is that I can build them as and when they fall apart for well under the cost of a new set of equivalent factory wheels, and upgrade bits of them, eg my front wheel started off as an XC wheel, it’s now got a DH rim on it, try doing that with a factory build! And hubs can be an investment in a way that wheels can’t.

I have a Shimano LX hub on a Mavic 238 rim that is around15 years old and it is fine, miniscule amount of play in the freehub and pitted bearings but still smooth and true.
It gets battered off rocks, roots, ridden off 3ft drop-offs and lightly jumped.

I think superstars are handbuilt, infact I’m fairly certain of it.

I’ve got thousands of miles out of road wheels, my current summer wheels are still like new but then they are only ridden in the dry and I tend not to clatter through potholes.

Mountainbike wheels normally last about 2 years (2 winters) but then they’ve normally died at the hub rather than the rim. They were handbuilts by Merlin, XT hubs in general.

Cummuting wheels last about a year or two but then I buy absolute bargain basement 26″ wheels.

I’d always go for handuilt or hand finished over pure machine built because I do think you get better wheels. When I’ve had bikes come with machine built wheels they have been dire. Snapping spokes, needing truing all the time. MY merlin wheels stay true until I crash.

Components matters a lot. I’ve found shimano hubs to be poor. The bearing races go unless you are religious with maintenance and the freehubs don’t seem to last very well either (and can’t be serviced). Alloy nipples are worth avoiding too as they seem much more fragile than brass.

The oracle which is thisisnotaspoon is talking pants in regard to wheels rims going out of true and not being able to be trued up after a couple of years use. When the wheels go badly out of true and have had some stick its best to just slacken all the spokes off a bit at a time and then start from a loose, laced wheel and dish and tension and true as if you were building a new wheels. Sure if the spokes and rim have stretched as little it will be sorted out when you do this. Most wheels that get some stick on say a hardtail will need to have a bit of TLC with regard to the tension and what not after a prolonged period of use.