Bicycle Touring 101: Spoke Emergency Repair Kit

A picture of most of the parts that make up my spoke repair kit. There are two spoke wrenches, four regular spokes, two drivetrain spokes and a fiberspoke. The Fiberspoke packs away into the small cylinder shown in the picture.
Click to enlarge.

From discussions with other cyclists and reading numerous journals it sounds like one of the most common problems experienced during a bicycle tour are broken or damaged spokes.

The problem is often attributed to carrying too much weight on rims and spokes that aren't designed to carry the load, poor maintenance habits such as ignoring a untrued wheel too long or hitting a nasty and giant pothole at the wrong time and speed.

Regardless of how it happens it has to be fixed. If you ignore a broken spoke then over time the remaining spokes will break leaving you with a loaded bike with a broken wheel.

I take some Spoke repair parts along on tour with me. My kit consists of the following:

To some people this equipment might seem like overkill especially since I've never had to use it. During my Round Lake Huron tour I met up with two Cross Canada cyclists who had plenty of tubes, tire patch kits and even spare tires but not a single spoke related repair item. At our last meal meeting place before we parted ways I gave them a Fiberspoke "just in case" since I already knew how common spoke problems can be from talking to others.

Later I heard from them via email that within four days of our parting, four spokes broke on the rear wheel of one bike. This happened in one of the more remote areas of their tour. After setting up the Fiberspoke they were able to ride through 75 km of forest to reach the next town with a bike shop where they replaced their spokes.

The Stein rear cassette remover.
Click to enlarge.

The Fiberspokes have the advantage of being light weight, small, relatively inexpensive and requiring almost no tools to use. You don't need to remove the rear cassette or anything else to get the bike working again. Often you can reuse the Fiberspoke many times as well. I like to think of the Fiberspoke as something I would use to allow me to finish the day's ride so that I can do a more permanent repair in the relative comfort of my campsite for the night although there have been reports in various tour journals of people successfully using fiberspokes to complete an entire tour.

More permanent repairs require having the correct spokes for your rims. These spokes are generally not too expensive and with the number you are likely to carry they will not add much weight. The hardest part about carrying them with you is that they are somewhat long in length making packing them a bit awkward.

A spoke wrench is needed to help with replacing the broken spoke. I initally carried the round spoke wrench shown in the first picture until I temporarily misplaced it just before leaving on a tour. I replaced it with a spoke wrench that's the exact size needed by the spokes. The rounded wrench supports many different spoke sizes making it an excellent general purpose tool but one mechanic that I spoke to said that it had more of a tendancy to round spoke ends then did the more specifically sized wrench that I use now.

Should the broken spoke be a rear wheel drive train side spoke then the repair job becomes trickier due to the need to remove the rear cassette in order to replace the spoke. There are heavier and bulkier tools available that are used by bike shop mechanics to do this but the extra weight and storage requirements make them less desirable to carry during a bicycle tour.

Thankfully there is a device called the Stein rear cassette remover. This device is compact and lightweight making removal of the rear cassette a relatively easy operation to perform.

Of course having all these tools available is really useless unless you also have the knowledge of how to use them. I will be adding more pages describing how to do these things but a very cost effective addition to your spoke repair kit would be some hands-on lessons with the mechanic in your local bicycle shop. Just remember that a broken bike in the middle of nowhere isn't likely what you want especially if the broken part is something as easily repaired as a spoke and pretour lessons take little time or cost.

While you are meeting up with the bicycle mechanic have them show you the basics of trueing a wheel. On tour you are not likely to have a trueing stand with you but you can often use the brake pads as a rough trueing guide provided you understand what you are doing from previous experience.