British bike brand Sonder brings wheel-building to the UK

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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.

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)

Raleigh

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.

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.

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.

Superstar lace in UK too for themselves and many others.

I believe Superstar has sold their wheel building machines. Perhaps Sonder purchased the machines?

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

Give over.

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

My Alpkit luggage was hand made in the UK….

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.

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.