Was cleaning and servicing the misses bike yesterday and noticed she has a bent spoke on her front wheel is not major just a bit of a kink but it now means its not a striaght line from wheel nipple to hub
is this bad?? its only one
Probably fine, rare to see them break anywhere but at the ends. Make sure tension is OK.
Prob back off the tension a bit, try pinging it and compare sound to a similar spoke.
WTF will that achieve?
Are you a spoke whisperer?
Oh yes....
If the spoke has been bent, it will therefore be under higher tension, hence my suggestion to back off the tension a bit.
The ping was to give a ROUGH idea of tension, thats all.
I have several bent spokes in my cross bikes front wheel - don't worry it'll be fine.
If the spoke's been bent it may well have plastically deformed a fair amount and could just as easily be loose. This is the case I've normally found. I just swap out the spoke ASAP but dont worry too much unless it's pulling the rim out of whack.
Ok ck, im hearing you, interesting....
Thinking out loud...
Generally they're under tension, the process of bending it means it must be stretched further to its new location (straight is the shortest run obviously) so in order for it to be bent it must plastically deform. As it's already in tension and the bend is likely to be fairly large radius (relative to diam) it's main constituent is going to be plastic deformation on the outside of the bend, in tension and probably on the inside too. Once that deformation has happened the spoke will relax back down the elastic load line (as if it were never plastically deformed) but now it's fractionally longer (at least on one side) so assuming the end points are fixed it will now be under less tension as some of the strain was absorbed by the plastic deformation. But, and I think this is where you were thinking, there's now a bend which means there's extra length to make up and if it had not deformed plastically it would now be under much more tension, but without fairly large Pdeformation it would just spring back into linear shape, but maybe the balance is dependent on the type of bend and other factors.
I'd need to think it over when I'm in a more analytical frame of mind to be sure of myself.
Just a thought, and matches my personal experience when I've bent spokes.
Not showing off now are we.....
I'll take your word, its a long time since i studied material properties.
well I think i will just leave it for the time being and see if it gets any worse over the next couple of weeks before considering a new spoke