It’s often said that, after the frame, the wheels make the biggest difference to your riding comfort and performance. I agree to some extent. However, tire volume and pressure probably have more influence on how a wheel feels than anything else.
The biggest problem consumers face when choosing a wheelset is the wall of marketing tirades they have to wade through to make their purchase. Recent years have seen an explosion of startup brands, all of whom say they’ve spent months or years, literally, reinventing the wheel. The first thing we normally do when one of these new brands pops up is to browse (or app these days, check the app store) the Taiwan Bike Source book to see if these have been pulled straight from the page.
The simple truth is that it is relatively cheap to buy a batch of wheels or parts from the Far East and brand them with some nice logos. This does not mean some brands don’t do great things, but I could launch a wheel company from the comfort of my own home in 30 minutes, and many consumers would have a hard time telling the difference.
Cycling weekly Undercover Mechanic will publish its opinion on the state of the industry once a month. He has been working with bicycles for over twenty years, servicing models from some of the best (and worst) bicycle brands. You will find him at all major fairs and events, but don’t expect him to make himself known.
To help you cut through the hassle that exists in the world of bicycle wheels, I thought I’d try to explain what to look for in a good wheel. If you don’t understand the basics of what makes a wheel, it’s almost impossible to know how to spend your money.
Cost
When I talk to a customer I usually lean towards this consideration, but let’s get straight to it: what is your budget, bearing in mind that you will probably need new tires and possibly cassette and rotors (approx £500/ $600) ?
The most common thing we ask for is a pair of light, strong wheels with carbon rims for £1,000/$1,200. There are several brands that sell these, often accompanied by very convincing advertising campaigns. If the aesthetics of the handlebars are all you’re concerned about, go for it. If you want to ride your wheels on anything other than the sunniest of days and have them last a reasonable amount of time, take some time to think about that purchase. Keith Bontrager is often credited with coining the phrase “light, strong, cheap: pick any two.” This certainly applies to bicycle wheels.
Our normal advice is that if your budget is £1,000/$1,200, spend £700/$900 on a really good set of aluminum rims with excellent quality (and lighter) hubs, spokes and nipples, then treat yourself to a top set of the best tyres. This gives you a much lighter system weight and a longer lifespan for your purchase than if you shop for a cheap set of plastic hoops. We normally recommend that the base price for a set of wheels with carbon rims, which would be better than a set of aluminum wheels at £700/$900, is £1,500/$1,900.
Rims
(Image credit: Getty Images)
The usual point of interest when buying a wheel is the rim. For carbon rims I would currently say that 40mm deep seems to be the standard and 21mm internal width is most common on modern wheels.
Hooked or hookless, I’m leaving for another article – 1000 words are not enough to go into this [watch this space! – Ed]. Nowadays we rarely see ‘Dangerably Bad Rims’ anymore. Most rebranded wheelsets typically use rims from one of about three factories anyway, and they’re fairly ubiquitous aside from the graphic design.
Spokes and nipples
As we work towards the center, the next components are the spoke nipples. These maintain tension on your spoke and are your only way to adjust spoke tension if your rim gets out of alignment. With cheap wheels, this is always the first area where costs are cut. A big selling point of wheels is their overall weight, so brands often use aluminum nipples which are much less robust than copper nipples, which are heavier and thus ‘blow your nose’. This is not an area I would skimp on.
Cheap aluminum nipples round off as soon as you start to reach high voltages and start to corrode galvanically, when you come into contact with stainless steel spokes, unless you are very careful in the build preparation, which cheap wheel manufacturers are not. There is one very well marketed wheel brand where we consistently see the aluminum nipples crumble into dust after just 700 miles. If you talk to their warranty department the standard response is to replace them with copper nipples. The reason they don’t fit these in the first place is because no one would buy the wheels if they weighed an extra 50 grams, and that’s where education comes in.
“When asked why they don’t just install copper nipples, they say no one would buy the wheels if they weighed the extra 50 grams.”
Next in line are the spokes. Good quality spokes are essential when you consider how they work. Essentially you hang from the rim via the top two or three spokes, so they need to be strong enough to support the full weight of your system. These are typically made of stainless steel, although other materials such as titanium, aluminum and carbon fiber have also been used.
My main advice here is simple: when buying a wheelset, check to see if replacement spokes are available. A good quality stainless steel J-bend spoke will always be available. We recently serviced a wheelset that used carbon spokes and three years after sale they were no longer available from the reseller. Sapim spokes are widely regarded by most wheel builders as the gold standard for stainless steel spokes, with DT Swiss being a close second.
I have always preferred J-bend spokes to straightening as they bend much better and last longer. I would say that straight pull spokes came about to make it faster and cheaper to build wheels, rather than any performance gain.
Hubby
Finally we come to the junctions. There are three main differences in hubs today. First, the bearing type. Most hubs these days use sealed bearings instead of cup and cone, and it’s one of the areas where brands often save money by fitting cheap non-contact seal bearings. These ensure that the wheels spin nicely when they are new, but do not keep out dirt or cleaning fluids. A quick word about ceramic bearings: if you use them, they require more maintenance and regular cleaning and re-lubrication with the right grease. If properly maintained they can last forever, but we often see ceramic bearings being thrown away after a year of use because they have been neglected.
The next major difference is the flange or straight pull. We prefer a flange because it puts less pressure on the head of the spoke when it bends.
Finally, you have the free hub locking mechanism. Classically this was a pall and ratchet system. Hubs using this system have tried to improve it by increasing the number of palls. However, this tends to be counterproductive, as manufacturing accuracy (or lack thereof) means that the pawls do not mesh together at the same time, causing one side of the hub to be fractionally loaded before the other, causing the hub shell to twist and the bearing to be much breaks down faster.
A much better system is a clutch ring arrangement such as the DT Swiss or Chris King design. Interestingly, DT Swiss’ patent for their Ratchet system recently expired, which is why several new copycat hubs are now coming to market. Talking to the guys at DT Swiss they didn’t seem too concerned about this as the spring tension that took them years to develop wasn’t detailed in their patent.
Your hub contains all the moving parts in the wheel, so this is the part that will wear out. Therefore, it is crucial that you can get spare parts for this. My advice when looking at any wheel brand is to see what spare parts are available and how far back they go in the wheel range. Again, I have no interest in promoting DT Swiss, but the hubs are a best seller for us because their design hasn’t changed dramatically in almost a decade and they stock and sell every spare part going back to dawn. of time.
it comes down to
(Image credit: Getty Images)
So “what are the best wheels to buy?” I hear you ask. The answer to this is very simple: it is the wheelset that best suits your needs. Don’t buy a ready-made set of wheels designed for 99% of the population; most of your money goes towards funding the massive marketing budget required to differentiate them from the identical competition.
Visit your local, reputable wheel builder and have him build a set of wheels suitable for your weight, riding style and intended use. I guarantee these will be cheaper, lighter and stronger than the ready-made versions of the same quality.