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At first, I wasn’t going to post this, but after thinking about it for a bit, I decided I should. There have been some conversations lately on this blog about rims. I’m not going to get into the debate again and I do think that this is a freak accident, but I’ve never seen something like this happen before and I believe it’s important to get this out there.

That being said, let me apologize to H+Son [H plus son, H + Son, ect] for posting it, but if this starts to happen a lot, you guys are going to have to re-evaluate how you’re manufacturing your rims.

You don’t want people’s wheels exploding on them while they’re bombing traffic, hills or whatever.

Thanks for the info Ganring.

My take on what happened:

It’s obvious the rim exploded at the valve-stem drilling in the rim. What most likely occurred was that the rider made an error we all have at some point; he didn’t properly nest the tube and tire within the hooks of the rim’s cross-section.

What usually happens when you do that is your tube slips past the wire bead of the tire and forms a bubble. You can ride on it like this, but it will eventually explode. From my observation, it appears that the rim’s inner wall was weaker than the tire bead and it took the released force the hardest resulting in the damage shown above.

These rims are deeper than Velocity Deep Vs and appear to be 1/2 the weight as well. Something has been compromised in the process.

The rider was not bunny-hopping or doing anything that would cause this kind of fracture. I was told that he just did a skid and heard a “pop”.

EDIT: Jay Rooney just alerted me to their new use!