"Roger Zoul" wrote in message
...
This is my bike:


http://www.specialized.com/SBCBkMode...u ybug.j27008

which I bought last September. I had about 200 miles on it until April
17,
now I have almost 800 miles. I've been riding a fair amount recently.

My bike has these wheels:

"Rolf design 700c twin spoke design high performance wheel set"

I don't know anything about Rolf but I'm getting a notion that they are
somehow designed for speed

I weigh 235 to 240 lbs.

Last Tuesday, after riding 30 miles, I popped a spoke on the rear wheel
and
it got out of true. I got it fixed on Wednesday at the LBS. I did
another
30 miles on Thursday, no problems, but the route was fairly easy in terms
of
hills. Today, while on a ride at about 25 miles out, I popped another
spoke
on the rear wheel on a route similar to the first one, but longer. I
ended
up walking home. The LBS fixed it and trued the wheel again. The folks
over
in .misc think that these spokes ought not to be popping and that I should
have the wheel rebuilt (I don't know what that means yet).

The owner of the LBS told me today that she thinks I ride up hills in too
high a gear, and doing so puts a lot of stress on the rear wheel. I
generally ride up hills (there are a goodly amount of hills here in
upstate
SC - Greenville) according to cadance, trying to keep it at or above 60.
I
do end up shifting down as I go up the hill, as it's sometimes hard to
know
what gear i really need to be in (I find hills deceptive -- some look
really
hard but turn out to be easy while others look easy but turn out to be
hard -- what's up with that?).

Any comments/advice/suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

I have had lots of problems with breaking rear wheel spokes. My advice is
to look at the Mavic Ksyrium Elite wheels. I replied to another post
earlier today with my results with 36 spoke hand built wheels. The summary
is that I have had horrible results with them but great results with the
Ksyrium Elites. It know that this goes completely against the overall
feelings of most of the vocal members of this group but the Ksyrium Elite
wheel has lasted more that three times longer than any of the hand built
wheels...and it had made zero trips to the LBS to get trued. Before anyone
says that I just got a bad builder I had the wheel built at three different
places. Each time I spoke to the owner, or lead tech, to explain my
situation and asked that the wheel be built by their best wheel builder.