[Closed] Are my carbon wheels worthless junk?

Handy for a road bike.

Maybe.

Yes, clearly junk.

I'll do you a favour, feel free to post them...

Don't tell me they're 650b as well.

*sucks teeth and winces*

21! How did you get this far!? Joking aside, if they work for you keep using them, they might not be worth lots but still work. Put some narrow mud spikes on them and keep them as winter wheels.

650b would be unacceptable to a dung beetle who had lost interest in its career and really let itself go...

Joking aside - perfectly good wheels, just get out and ride and ignore the marketing machine!

I was just surprised that they are so narrow given they came on a reasonably new bike..

If they weren't that daft inbetweeny size I'd stick them on the xc bike and use the wider and heavier wheels from that on the trance, but alas due to some genious, all my bike rims are now different sizes..

Prob designed for getting through narrow trails with tightly spaced trees etc

There's a few folk fitting 650 rims and wider 44-47mm tyres to gravel/adventure bikes. I'm sure a 21mm rim would be ideal for that.

How many times have they made you crash?

A) None
B) More than none

If the answer is A, then why change them.

If the answer is B, really think hard and answer the question again.

admits to only having 26 " bikes with straight steerers

There's a few folk fitting 650 rims and wider 44-47mm tyres to gravel/adventure bikes. I'm sure a 21mm rim would be ideal for that

This, do this.

I'm pretty sure i used to run 2.4" tyres on 21mm rims without any problem at all, so little problem in fact that it never even occurred to me 21mm might be anything other than the perfect rim width for mtb, neither DH wide not XC narrow.

I did this for many years.

I'm not dead, yet.

Ditto! In fact, I think I ran 2.3" tyres on XC717s, so 17mm rims? I guess I was running them at 30psi though which is probably crazy high by today's standards.

Two solid years of Peak District abuse on those wheels and have run DH 2.4 tyres at Ard Rock. No problems at all. Have never measured them amd wouldn't have known the measurement unless you mentioned it. They have been great and will only replace them once they are FUBAR.

Compared to my 29er Hope XC whelks, which I also ride daily in the Peak District, they are like a DEEMAX. Put them on a gravel bike? Behave.

I run a minion 2.5 dhf on my 819s and haven't killed myself, yet

I’ve got a pair of 19mm 26” carbon rims I never quite got around to building (was a sale bargain and life got in the way)

At some point I’ll build them and probably just whack Dampfs on as Dampfs are all I have left in 26” apart from some FireXC’s that must be perishing by now 🙂

719 with a 2.4 Ardent 29 on the front of my SS here. Booking funeral tomorrow 🙂

If you'd measured them in 2015 you'd have been happy. That time has passed.

Unless you like riding square tyres, or own a fat bike, 21mm is fine for a 2.3 tyre.

They/youll be fine, I ran up to 2.5 tyres on the 456-evo I owned for years, turned out the Ree'tard wheels on that bike were only 19mm or so....no probs, the wide rim thing is marketing.
What was the go-to DH wheel for privateers and some trade teams?....the Deemax, the internal width?....something like 21-23mm.

According to the fashionistas on here that shouldn't work, also here's another secret...most of the guys and girls in WC DH and EWS are running more psi than most on this forum too.

As someone else said, run wide rims, a huge tyre and bugger all psi and you end up with a square profile tyre with crap progression from upright to lean....but then when every Sunday is spent riding Llandegla bolt upright like a roll down the promenade i don't suppose this really matters!

admits to only having 26 " bikes with straight steerers

+1

721's were the DH rim of choice for many a year. To my knowledge, no one died due to insufficient rim width.

deviant - Member
....no probs, the wide rim thing is marketing...

Wide rims have plenty benefits for people who simply like to ride their bikes in places without groomed surfaces.

However a pic of a middle aged codger struggling through soft stuff halfway up his wheel is never going to be an attractive marketing proposition.

We had wide rims back before the millennium. The problem was that there wasn't much choice in wide tyres back then.

If you wanted to go over 2" most tyres which were thick and heavy. Wide was for the DH boys who don't notice things like drag. 🙂

I'm still running a set of 40mm rims I bought in 1998 in Oz. Skinny rims and tyres were useless for riding on tracks with inches of loose dirt. (Oz riders who have hit the outback will know exactly what I mean).

When It became obvious the trend was away from wide, I grabbed a few extra sets of wide rims - I still have 2 sets of Phat Alberts hanging up in my shed. 🙂

This was as fat as I could go back in the early 2000s. The only bike with room for decent tyres was a Surly - they were way ahead of the times there. (pic taken when I imported my bike over here)

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Now that decent light supple tyres are readily available in wide fittings, wide rims make sense.

All you need to know is that legendary abuser of rims (Aaron Gwin) rides EX471s which have an internal diameter of 25mm....anybody on here trying to tell you that you need to go wider is talking guff.

Also, Maxxis (i think?) came out last year amongst all this fun super wide bollox and said their AM/DH tyres are designed for __mm wide rims (cant remember the exact number but it was less than 30mm internal).....their reasoning was that the profile is all wrong if the tyre is stretched out over a wider rim and you lose the arch shape they designed into the tyre, you also develop less than desirable features like horrible transition from upright to leant over...because its like riding something with the frontal profile of a brick...

...tread that should be almost on the side of the tyre if it was mounted properly on a narrower rim giving an arch shape and grip covering a fair percentage of its surface ends up square with said tread doing nothing now except pointing up in the air and riders then complaining that said tyre leads to 'washouts' and has no side grip....well yeah obviously, because you've taken a tyre designed for a 25mm internal rim and stretched it across a 35mm rim instead....and now you're wondering why it doesnt work as designed?!

Lets also not get into how the tyre companies design and test their products (with pro rider input) with x-amount of psi in them and then some nobody on a forum comes along and goes "hey, i'm making it up technical climbs like a god if i run 10psi instead of the recommended 25psi"....shortly followed by a post complaining that said tyres now burp when going round corners, and another post asking why the front of their bike is now washing out on fast turns...

...in short if half the BDS field are running Deemax rims with a 28mm internal diameter your 30mm+ rims are not the cause of ANY of your crap riding...its user error not equipment fail.

Exceptions can be made for fat bikes and riding on snow, sand etc but really now many of us do that?....i counted zero fat bike riders in last winters snow when i was out on my moto-x bike, pertinent to another thread on here today is just how busy BPW is and the behemoth its become...thats the kind of riding this country is moving towards (rightly or wrongly) and if you think you NEED wider rims to get down those trails then you probably need to rethink your riding a little, you're not at Rampage, you're at a rough moderately steep hill in South Wales...you do not need a set-up that Gwin would find excessive for a WC DH track.

🙄

deviant - Member
All you need to know is that legendary abuser of rims (Aaron Gwin) rides EX471s which have an internal diameter of 25mm....anybody on here trying to tell you that you need to go wider is talking guff...

I'll take it that's aimed at me. (Cap fits, etc)

I think you are looking at the needs of the common or garden rider through the narrow and somewhat superior attitude of a racing perspective.

The likes of Aaron Gwin no doubt would be faster than any of us if he rode a unicycle with skinny tyres.

Just as few people need 200mph cars or are interested in exploiting them, the same applies to bikes.

I think it would be safe to estimate that 95% of mtb riders do not have the skills and fitness to race properly (if you have actual figures, I'm happy to be corrected).

I suspect you'd label most of that 95% as 'crap' riders.

I'll happily admit to that label - it doesn't stop me getting my bike up more mountains than most, and I'm happy to have my lack of skills and gnarr compensated for by superior grip and flotation.

BTW I remember hearing all this sort of nonsense against wide tyres when mtbs first came out. Who needs those big wide (2") tyres etc? Too much drag etc. (Back when people rode offroad on bikes with 27" wheels, very narrow rims, 1¼" tyres and dropbars.)

But if your riding life is not restricted to racing, then you'll find plenty places where having more volume and lower pressure is a benefit, especially if you want to actually get somewhere with unknown terrain.

The rest of your post is fair enough. Don't fit tyres intended for narrow rims on wide rims and expect them to behave the same way. But there is no need to do that these days - there's plenty of plus size tyres.

There is a lot more to mountain biking than racing, it's not all about speed and heroic stunts, and the heavily populated south with its restricted access is the anomaly, not the norm.

I ride rims with 21mm internal width. Apart from being a pain (but possible) to fit Procore on, I really couldn't give less of a **** about the width.

There are pros and cons to going wider and narrower, and things ride fine on these rims, I'll replace them when they break which hopefully will be a long time as the only thing that's caused any out of trueness was some numpty (me) not doing the nipple holder bits up tight enough/with threadlock (Mavic 821 rim).

Some total bollocks on this thread. E.g.

If the answer is A, then why change them.

If the answer is B, really think hard and answer the question again.

Since when is MTBing about simply not crashing? FFS.

My rims are 22.5 internal with on-one smorgasbord tyres. I only know because i've just looked it up. Hasn't caused me any issues. Seem to keep up ok with everyone else I ride with.

If the answer is A, then why change them.
If the answer is B, really think hard and answer the question again.

Since when is MTBing about simply not crashing? FFS..

Tongue firmly in cheek.

Also, Maxxis (i think?) came out last year amongst all this fun super wide bollox and said their AM/DH tyres are designed for __mm wide rims (cant remember the exact number but it was less than 30mm internal).....their reasoning was that the profile is all wrong if the tyre is stretched out over a wider rim and you lose the arch shape they designed into the tyre, you also develop less than desirable features like horrible transition from upright to leant over...because its like riding something with the frontal profile of a brick...

And now, most of their new tyres are designed from the ground up for 35mm inner width rims.

When I got back into riding about 20 years ago, xc rims were 17mm, freeride 19. and down hill 21mm. Most bikes came shod with 19mm until a couple of years ago, and no one even questioned it. I like a wider rim, and have run 26mm Rhinolite's on the Inbred for years.... used to get some funny looks, using something so hard core on a xc bike. Funny how things change eh? 🙂