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I picked these up new a while back, and thinking of building them into a pair of easy off road wheels - basically local firetracks / gravel.
The spoke holes don't have eyelets so what is the view. ? Fine for this light use or would I be better getting some eyeletted rims and any recommendations at the bottom end of the price market.
No experience of WTB i25 but I had the same question with Mavic XC421 (my only non-eyeletted build). I went ahead with them and have used them for general XC duties and had no problems (it's only been half a year or so, however).
I’ve only used the i25 Teams and they were fine rims built as 29er or 26er for general MTB use. I believe the ST’s are softer.
I built some up on some DT350s and battered them on Street, jumps and trails, and they were absolutely fine. There are a lot of strong non eyeletted rims out there 🙂
I had a pair of i25 KOM's on my big bike for a while. No issues at all, only changed them as I changed wheel size.
I run them. I did a rim swap by just removing the nipples and moving the spokes over one by one, so the spoke length was not optimum. Have been using them for nearly a year, they have seen some heavy use in the lakes. I don't ride with any finesse and seem to be holding up rather well.
I had no idea how good/bad they would be, they were cheap at the time from PX. I've even bought some more and will be building a scratch set of wheels in the coming month.
They'll be fine.
I use non-eyeletted WTB rims on my five, which gets battered about a lot & they've been fine.
I thought the sti25 and i23 rims I built wheels with last year did have eyelets. But the Dt rims I built with shortly after didn’t - but had phr washers instead.
The i25’s got bashed around on my hardtail for about 6-8 months before I sold off the bits of that bike (went from 26er to 650b). They were still running perfectly true when I sold the wheels.
if they're the Frequency Team ones (with the I beam in the middle of the rim) they'll be spot on - and they're designed to not need eyelets and have some 4-axis wizardry drilling to make sure the nips sit square with the spoke. I build with them LOTS and are currently my favourite rims. The i25 width builds up really quick as it's laterally very stiff. The ST ones aren't too bad either, but are definitely a a softer alloy - they also appear to not make them anymore!
I had i23 on my hard tail and managed to rip a spoke nipple through the rim whilst riding the trails round Hebden Bridge, prior to that they'd been Ok.
Think they were the Assym model and not sure how they'd compare to the slightly wider 25, but I wouldn't have them again based on my experience.
I built up a set of Frequency team i25s for my AM9. Easy to build and seem strong enough for BPW, windhill etc. - no problems to report yet.
Many thanks for the information everyone - on the balance I think I will get them built up.