Wire wheel 6 rigid spokes began to appear in the Olympic Games and professional racing: these have advantages in specialized applications, such as time trials, but wire-spoked wheels are used for most purposes. The reaction to a radial load of a well-tensioned wire spoked wheel, such as by a rider sitting on a bicycle, is that the wheel flattens slightly near the ground contact area. The rest of the wheel remains approximately circular. The tension of all the spokes does not increase significantly. Instead, only the spokes directly under the hub decrease their tension. The issue of how best to describe this
Rim (wheel) object. Some authors are careful to use "rim" for only the outer portion of a wheel, where the tire mounts, just as the rim of a coffee cup or a meteor crater does not refer to the entire object. One engineering text says "alloy wheels [are] often incorrectly called aluminum rims". Others use "rim" to mean the entire metal part to which the tire mounts, because the rim and the wheel are often cast or stamped from a single piece of metal instead of being distinct as with wire wheels. At the same time, "wheel" may refer to the entire