I’m looking to buy some new wheels for my Rapide, do I go  centre lock or 6 bolt?  Does it matter?

6 bolt rotors are cheaper to buy and easier to come by. I think centrelock can be slightly lighter. I’d probably stick with 6 bolt as it’s more common.

Pick the wheels you want and worry about rotors later. I’ve run both and noticed no difference . At the moment my CL wheels are running 6 bolt rotors with adaptors.

Function wise, no difference.

Unless you carry the specific tool (and something to apply leverage) on rides, it’s gonna be more difficult to sort any issues on the trail, assuming most people would have a multi tool with a torx t25 attachment.

I’ve had no issues with my CL rotors though

Two sets of each on road and MTB and I can’t tell any difference. Possibly CL a gnats lighter

I’ve never had a six bolt come loose. I can’t say the same about centrelock.

FWIW I own both and haven’t had an issue with either. I think most of my CL wheels use a 6 bolt to CL adapter but that adds cost and weight.

I wouldn’t base my whole purchasing decision on whether the wheels are CL or 6 bolt, they both work.

6 bolt.

It’s an International Standard.

and can be sorted trailside more easily if necessary.

iirc centrelock dissipates the heat into the hub better so probably has “marginal gains” doubt any of us mortals would notice though.

I’ve never had a six bolt come loose. I can’t say the same about centrelock.

ive had a 6 bolt hanging on by two bolts before I realised what the issue was. Thread lock prevents that though. 

centrelock often has a small amount of annoying movement. And the discs are more expensive. And you’re unlikely to have a tool in your riding pack, nor probably on your holiday toolkit. 

6-bolt if you plan to travel with the bike – for the tool reasons mentioned above

As above, 6-bolt is a standard, CL isn’t.

Ask me how I know…

6 bolt with Ti bolts, all and any issues covered. 

6 bolt, because you can leave 3 bolts at home to save mega weight.
Neither looks to be in danger of becoming obsolete, far as one can tell.

6 bolt. I hate centre-lock, it just seems like a pointless thing that doesn’t do anything better, requires a special tool (which you probably don’t carry on a ride or trip), half the time there’s some play in them and you can buy the 6 little bolts pretty much anywhere in the world if something happens.

What spokes are you planning on using? If you’re thinking of Berd, there are hubs with hook flanges for them, but all of them so far are CL only.

I’ve got both, there’s no difference really. You can buy cheap 6-bolt rotors from 3rd parties. But you can also get cheap OEM CL ones taken off new bikes because someone’s swapped their aftermarket ones over with adapters.

The only problem I’ve had is that the CL standard isn’t very standard. A CL rotor fits a CL hub, but then there’s variations of how the lock rings are sized/configured, and not just the BB tool Vs Cassette locking tool which then means adapters don’t always fit. e.g Campag/fulcrum wheels won’t accept any of the generic or DT swiss adapters because the lockring is inverted.

If two wheelsets were the same price and I needed new rotors I’d get 6-bolt.

On the road bike I’d probably get CL because it looks slightly neater with small rotors.

IIRC CL hubs + adapters is actually a few grams lighter than 6-bolt hubs + bolts (may vary between brands).

Otherwise I’d either get whatever was discounted more or whatever fit my existing rotors.

I’ve never had a six bolt come loose. I can’t say the same about centrelock.

I’ve had a 6-bolt come lose, one bolt must have been loose for a while, then another next to it and it quickly cascaded to a trashed hub.

Trailside fixes are a non sequitur, you don’t worry about cassettes or BB’s, although there did used to be a dropout mounted tool for touring bikes to do it.

If you’re worried the clamping force on CL is a lot higher.

40Nm * 20/1.5 = about 3 and a half times 4Nm * 6 * 5/0.8

I have both…. I would go 6 bolts every time now, all things being equal….

Thanks,  it seams 6 bolt is the most popular!  I’ve got centrelock on my road bike and had no issues and take my cassette tool with us when we go abroad.  The current wheels are 6 bolt, so I think I’ll stay with them and not have to buy new discs.

I’ve only used CL once and the tool was such a sloppy poor fit I thought it must be wrong but apparently it was right, I just don’t like em, but at least Hope now do their floating rotors in CL.
With 6 bolt you can shim the rotor, especially helpful and necessary when boost converting or just improving caliper placement, and the convenience makes 6 bolt a no brainer for me.

6 bolt you can fix trailside, centrelock you can’t, that alone should have nailed the coffin lid down on centrelock.

That said I do have a mix of the two and centrelock’s not terrible- I’d always choose 6-bolt but I’ll buy a centrelock wheel if it’s cheaper. And then generally fit a 6-bolt rotor with an adaptor.

Head says 6-bolt. Cheaper, better spares availability, more easily serviced.

Heart says centre lock. Torque transmitted through splines is just better than through bolts in shear. Those bolts might work fine, but they’re not elegant. 

For road I’d prefer CL, mtb would be 6 bolt. Which is what I use. 

I’ve got both. I don’t like the centrelocks purely as it feels like the wrong solution – something Shimano conjured up just to be bloody awkward and then had to conjure up further bodges when they realised it didn’t work with many through axles. I wouldn’t worry over having to tighten one up, I’d be more concerned about trying to remove a bent rotor in the middle of nowhere after an off.

Heart says centre lock. Torque transmitted through splines is just better than through bolts in shear. Those bolts might work fine, but they’re not elegant.

In both cases it’s friction between the disk and hub flange, not the bolts/splines. But the CL does have much higher clamping force, the splines just mean you get a warning and rattling sort of failure rather than the disk spinning and knakcering the hub as soon as the fastener fails. Same with 6-bolt you hopefully get some warning before >2 bolts fail.

If it were the splines they would need to be a much better fit, and much more surface area (think of the mess a cassette makes on a freehub, which is an order of magnitude less torque than braking).

Leaving aside the infinitesimal chance of trailside failure (which doesn’t seem to stop people using hydraulic brakes, suspension, electric motors and the like which are also non-field repairable), it was a lot easier swapping CL rotors out on my patio yesterday, spinning then off with a BB tool and ratchet spanner in 30 seconds. You can use both CL and 6 bolt rotors on a CL hub, but not on a 6 bolt hub. Just thought I’d throw that into the mix, it’s not an issue I can get too worked up about either way.

A few folk have mentioned trailside repair as a consideration and I’m curious as to what these might be. I’m not being skeptical, just curious!

As for the maintenance side of things, I’ve had disc bolts get rounded out and had enormous faff removing the discs and I’m guessing it’s less of an issue with centrelock. Not such a big deal that I’d make it part of the consideration when choosing a hub though.

Fancy coloured CL >IS adaptors can be found on Wish and work just fine at a reasonable price.

If you use torque caps on rockshox forks, or want to at some point in the future, you have to use 6 bolt I think.

I’d say get what you’ve already got – less new tools needed. Four bikes in the household with 6 bolt, so made sense to get spare wheels that were also 6 bolt for the FS bike.

6 bolt you can fix trailside, centrelock you can’t, that alone should have nailed the coffin lid down on centrelock.

erm….trailside tool for centrelock.  Works with any 12mm TA.

https://bikepacking.com/gear/terske-travel-tools-lindarets/

With  Centrelock I can swap my rotors onto my second pair of wheels on my Camino in a minute or two. If I had 6 bolt I doubt I’d bother doing that very often. Also as someone else mentioned no small screws to get full of crap and potentially round out.

As an engineer – CL is shit.

{thread closed}

Who swaps rotors between wheels on a regular basis, you just get extra rotors ?

As an engineer – CL is shit.

Smaller BoM,
Less assembly time or likelihood of cross threading,

Lighter, cheaper easier to manufacture hub,

Always 100% concentric to the axle centre,

Better transmission of braking force,

No galvanic issues (aluminium hub, carrier and lock ring),

No chance of a worked loose bolt damaging your forks.

It seems pretty good to THIS engineer.

From choice, centrelock. Packing a bike for travel? You can remove the rotors easily so they don’t get bent in transit. Much easier to swap between wheel sets too.

Daffy
Full Member

erm….trailside tool for centrelock. Works with any 12mm TA.

https://bikepacking.com/gear/terske-travel-tools-lindarets/

That looks like another persuasive argument against centrelock tbh. All you need to do is carry an additional tool which costs $25 to take care of a job that every bike multitool in the world can do.

I’ve got centrelock road wheels but all my other bikes are 6 bolt.

To me CL is just a stupid thing that isn’t needed and another example of the bike industry over complicating things unnecessarily.

Ive had fun and games with the ones on my Hunt wheels. It had external flanges lock rings as standard – but one of the lock rings was thicker than the other – so you could grip one fine but not the other (I think it had 6bolt rotors with centrelock adapters). 

Decided to get some fancy Xtr rotors – had a bastard of a job getting the old rotors off and then found the new lock rings were internally flanged. But none of the tools I had would tighten them as they couldn’t get over the hub endcaps. Couldn’t take the end caps off without removing the rotor. So I had to buy a few tools until I found one with deep enough splines. Ffs.

On a related note, I needed 2 CL rotors for some 2nd hand wheels. Merlin were knocking out SLX versions for £10 each! And that was for 203s. Looking at the packaging, that appears to include the lock ring.

Also offers on ice-tech CL if you’re feeling posh.

I have 6 bolt on all my MTBs, the gravel digger came with CLs. In 20 years ish of riding discs, I’ve never had to remove a rotor on the trails. Obviously that means tonight it’s going to happen ;_

That looks like another persuasive argument against centrelock tbh. All you need to do is carry an additional tool which costs $25 to take care of a job that every bike multitool in the world can do.

No, you said centrelock couldn’t be fixed trailside and many others agreed due to the size of the tool needed.

I showed that there was a means of doing it.

But with a clamping force of 40Nm and no chance of rounding off a bolt head, there’s almost no chance of it coming loose if done up correctly.  

I’ve never had either go wrong so won’t be carrying any special tools. Just like I wouldn’t carry a BB tool, a cassette tool, a bleed kit etc