British bike brand Sonder brings wheel-building to the UK

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This topic has 34 replies, 29 voices, and was last updated 4 months ago by IHN.

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British bike brand Sonder brings wheel-building to the UK
mashr
Full Member

Quick, add in something about being “hand finished” before everyone gets upset about machine built wheels!
Posted 4 months ago

colin9
Full Member

Are most wheels actually hand finished? I’m thinking of the biggish more premium MTB brands such as Hope, Hunt, Stans, I would imagine they’ll all just be machine trued and sold out the door.
Posted 4 months ago

mashr
Full Member

colin9
Full Member

Are most wheels actually hand finished? I’m thinking of the biggish more premium MTB brands such as Hope, Hunt, Stans, I would imagine they’ll all just be machine trued and sold out the door.

This is Hunt:

“Hand-built | All of our road bike rim brake wheels are built and finished by hand, inclusive of a full quality control inspection.”
Posted 4 months ago

VanHalen
Full Member

hopefully QC will be upped as my Sonder wheels lasted 2 rides before they need re-tensioning , re-dishing and truing. all of teh rear wheel spokes became very very loose very fast.
Posted 4 months ago

asbrooks
Full Member

Hand finished means.. Remove from machine and put it in a box. No?
Posted 4 months ago

rhayter
Full Member

I didn’t know Sonder are a B-Corp. That’s really impressive.
Posted 4 months ago

IHN
Full Member

hopefully QC will be upped as my Sonder wheels lasted 2 rides before they need re-tensioning , re-dishing and truing. all of teh rear wheel spokes became very very loose very fast.

Yeah, I’m currently waiting to hear back from them after I got a cracked rim after a fairly innocuous ding.
Posted 4 months ago

finbar
Free Member

Wheel building doesn’t need a hyphen.

If it had a noun afterwards e.g. “wheel-building tool” then it would become a compound adjective and a hyphen should be used.
Posted 4 months ago

pmurden
Full Member

This is cool but that’s my sodding mechanic they’ve nicked to build them! Good luck in you new venture Jim Byatt.
Posted 4 months ago

mashr
Full Member

asbrooks
Full Member

Hand finished means.. Remove from machine and put it in a box. No?

It means whatever the marketing people want it to mean
Posted 4 months ago

mick_r
Full Member

Why are all the pictures showing hand lacing and building but all the blurb is about machine built?
Posted 4 months ago

tthew
Full Member

This is Hunt:

“Hand-built | All of our road bike rim brake wheels are built and finished by hand, inclusive of a full quality control inspection…”

… the other 99% of our output is lashed together by a robot and sent out without any kind of checks.

(not true I’m sure, but their sentence did seen to leave something hanging 😁).

edit – as mick_r says, there’s some confusing images and text here – what does this mean?

Sonder’s new wheel-building machine can lace a wheel in just 1-3 minutes! The skilled hands that lace and finish the wheels can put 30 pairs of wheels through the machine in a day.
Posted 4 months ago

Superficial
Free Member

When Sonder Product Manager Neil Sutton designs a bike, he conceptualises both the frame and the wheels together.

This is one of the more ridiculous examples of marketing speak.
Posted 4 months ago

dirkpitt74
Full Member

I assume it’s something like this:

Hub is pre-spoked and the ‘Hooman’ feeds the spoke in to the rim for the machine to do it’s stuff.
Posted 4 months ago

devash
Free Member

Not the best PR copy. Let me rewrite it;

“Hey you, mountain biker! You know that crappy stock wheelset that comes with every low to mid-range bike you’ve ever bought? The one that weighs as much as a baby elephant, with rims made of soft cheese, built around generic Novatec hubs forged from the finest porcelain? The one that you can’t wait to upgrade to something worthwhile from DT Swiss the second your work bonus or tax refund comes in? Yeah, that’s the one! Well good news! They’re now hand-made* in the UK!”

(*disclaimer – not actually made by human hands)
Posted 4 months ago

TrailriderJim
Full Member

What is a B-corp? Think their awful outsourced build quality has forced their hand on this. A couple of mates ride Sonders and I’ve had to help keep keep their wheels running while they sort out warranty replacements.
Posted 4 months ago

paton
Free Member

Raleigh

Posted 4 months ago

rOcKeTdOg
Full Member

You know that crappy stock wheelset that comes with every low to mid-range bike you’ve ever bought? The one that weighs as much as a baby elephant, with rims made of soft cheese, built around generic Novatec hubs forged from the finest porcelain?

Hunt’s mission statement surely?
Posted 4 months ago

stumason10
Full Member

Hope machine lace and hand finish in UK. Final tension true and inspection. Superstar lace in UK too for themselves and many others.
So not big news. But great to see more insourcing and reduced shipping. The price of shipping right now probably more than justified the salary.
Posted 4 months ago

Aidy
Free Member

Yeah. Poor headline. Lots of UK wheel builders. Needed a qualifying “their”.
Posted 4 months ago

pnik
Full Member

My Sonder wheels have been fine for 2 years on my gravel bike. And my dealings with the company have also been good. I applaud their environmental stance but mourn plain English that marketing has butchered.
Posted 4 months ago

bowglie
Full Member

My experience of their early wheelsets was not good, but I gather they’ve improved in the last 12 months. Although the marketing blurb is a bit cringe, it’s good to hear of another company bringing manufacturing (or at least assembly) back to the UK.
Posted 4 months ago

hatter
Full Member

I didn’t know Sonder are a B-Corp. That’s really impressive.

It’d be a lot more impressive if they actually fabricated anything in house. It’s a lot harder to be a B-corp when you’re not just assembling warehousing and shipping stuff made elsewhere.

If someone like Continental, Hope or DT Swiss, who all have serious in house manufacturing capacity goes for B-corp status that would be seriously hard to do and require massive investment.

Still, it’s better they did it than didn’t do it so it’s still a positive move on Sonders part.
Posted 4 months ago

whatyadoinsucka
Free Member

i can rate the alpha 650b wheels they do. sound good run smooth, no complaints.
and if you’ve bought a sonder recently check your alpkit account, nice 10% dividend of vouchers on my account.. wasnt expecting that
Posted 4 months ago

cheers_drive
Full Member

Superstar lace in UK too for themselves and many others.

I believe Superstar has sold their wheel building machines. Perhaps Sonder purchased the machines?
Posted 4 months ago

liam1974
Full Member

I have on good knowledge they have bought the wheel building machine from Superstar, but looking at the photos it looks like they have just employed some mechanics to build the wheels. Why not show some photos of the actual machine ?
Posted 4 months ago

DaveyBoyWonder
Free Member

“When Sonder Product Manager Neil Sutton designs a bike, he conceptualises both the frame and the wheels together.”

Give over.
Posted 4 months ago

finbar
Free Member

Are Superstar stopping doing wheels then? I hope not.
Posted 4 months ago

footflaps
Full Member

It’d be a lot more impressive if they actually fabricated anything in house.

My Alpkit luggage was hand made in the UK….
Posted 4 months ago

thisisnotaspoon
Full Member

“When Sonder Product Manager Neil Sutton designs a bike, he conceptualises both the frame and the wheels together.”

Revolutionary, have any other bike designers ever considered the wheels as part of the bike?

Does at @Brant just imagine people bouncing their frames allong the ground?
Posted 4 months ago

hatter
Full Member

My Alpkit luggage was hand made in the UK….
Posted 2 hours

Sewing bags is hardly an energy intensive industrial process, I doubt Alpkit make the fabric, zips and webbing themselves, that will be where most of the environmental impact is.
Posted 4 months ago

unovolo
Free Member

“I think it needs just a little something else”
Posted 4 months ago

IHN
Full Member

I think they must be too busy setting up their new machine to respond to my email about the cracked rim such is currently rather curtailing my riding.
Posted 4 months ago

IHN
Full Member

Just to follow this up in case anyone stumbles across it in future – I got a call from Alpkit/Sonder yesterday, and they’ve sorted me out with a replacement wheel at a very fair cost. Fair play to them (although I did need to chase them a bit)
Posted 4 months ago