Wider rims - which ones?

[Bianchi Boy]

Hi,

I am considering building a pair of wheels with wider rims. The options and opinions are confusing me slightly. Internal width looks like key factor. My well trusted Open Pros are 15c and the new Open Pros are 19c. I have a bike with 57mm drop brakes and guards. Normally I have used 25mm tyres but am looking for a 28mm pair. There is now a wider rage of good 28mm tyres.

So the choices - which rim width 17c, 19c or even wider? Which tyres. I tend to build my own wheels and have a supplier for all spoke sizes.

So which rims would you choose?

BB

[Zed43]

I am a fan of the Kinlin XR31 rims. These are 31mm high and 24mm wide (19mm internal), tubeless ready and weigh 490 grams. Sturdy, reasonably priced at ~ 55 UKP, available for disc or rim brakes, both in symmetric and asymmetric shape. Oh, and they look good 

As for tyres: I like the "extra light" Compass Jon Bon Pass (35mm) but they are expensive and getting them sealed for tubeless can be a pain. Continental GP4000 28mm (31mm on the Kinlins) are nice too but a little less comfy. 32mm Continental 4Season (34mm measured) feel a bit slower and harsher still. But it's all rather subjective I think.

[vorsprung]

The cheapest option might be something like LX17 from Spa Cycles (i think17mm internal).   Velocity A23 (23mm internal) are widely available and suited to tubeless.  H Son Plus aren't tubeless compatible but are cheaper than A23 and a similar width.

[BrianI]

According to sheldon brown, a 15c rim can take 23 to 32mm tyres?

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/tire-sizing.html#iso

So keep current wheels (unless the rims are worn out), and see how you get on with fitting a 28mm tyre? 

What's the maximum width of rim that your drop brakes can take?

[dim]

HED Belgium plus rims

[Torslanda]

Be careful with rims wider than 17mm on road bikes. A customer brought me a pair of 'SuperStar' wheels which IIRC were 19mm, they were certainly a lot wider than 15mm Open Pro.

They fitted fine but the brakes were a sod to set up. 105 with a 49mm drop. The caliper had to open so wide that it was difficult to get the brake pads to contact the rim squarely. Leaving out the orbital washer worked but the pad wouldn't tighten correctly becaus ethe pad backing wasn't flat.

Also be wary of tyre pressure restrictions, these SuperStar rims had a max of 85 psi with a 25mm tyre. Possibly a little more research needed?

[andrew_s]

I'd go for 15 or 17 mm rims (LX17, probably).
19 mm is marginal with 25 mm tyres, IMO, and if you use guards you are unlikely to be able to fit tyres larger than 28 mm under 57 mm brakes.

[Brucey]

I'll put in a good word for H+Son Archetypes.  They have decently thick braking surfaces and they are soooo much stiffer than the old open pro you will be amazed.

A typical 25mm tyre (which is 25mm when fitted on a 15C open pro) comes up 26-27mm on these rims.

cheers

[canny colin]

I have the chance of buying some nos campagnolo record hubs  ( 11speed)  laced with 32 spokes front & rear to  mavic open pros at a good price . I was going to buy some xr22t / xr22rt kinlin rims or archetypes  laced 24 f & 28r to  miche primatos hubs.  But the campag are cheaper  . I have recently moved up 28 mm tyres because of the crap road surface .  Will a new style wide rim with 25mm be far better  than 28mm tyres on  open pros (I normally use duranos) & only have clearance for 28mm tyres .Will a new style rim be  actually stronger bearing in mind the extra spokes . Thanks colin . ps apologises to bianchi boy but i think its on the same topic   

[ElyDave]

GP 4 seasons at a pita to get onto LX17s

[Blodwyn Pig]

Vote here for H plus son TB 14, 17mm internal width, look retro, ie shallow and flat, and come in Black, Ano grey, and polished.

[Brucey]

BTW new Open Pro rims seem to me to have gone 'too light for their size'.  I had the chance to look at a new set recently (being used as replacements for rims of similar ERD) and they are very lightweight but they have a low pressure rating and more worryingly they have what I can only describe as 'a pathetically thin braking surface'.

 When measured (using verniers and a spacer made from a length of spoke in the groove at the back of the rim) the braking surface appeared to be around 1.0mm thickness but I saw some readings that suggested this was an overestimate.

I joked that the new rims were already 'more worn out' than the old ones, and more careful measurements actually proved this to be the case....

So old style Open pros were not exactly blessed with thick braking surfaces either but the new ones make the old ones look 'rugged' in this respect by comparison...

FWIW Duranos have a rather thick tread and may come up a different size to other tyres at any nominal width.

I'd also second LX17s as offering a tight fit with many tyres.

cheers

[Samuel D]

Will a new style wide rim with 25mm be far better

Better for what? If the 28 mm tyre ends up fatter on the narrower rim than the 25 mm on the wider rim, it will have have more comfort and lower rolling resistance at a given pressure.

The comfort, required air pressure, and rolling resistance are to a good approximation dependent on measured section width. Wider rims don’t magically confer performance in themselves. Tyres on wider rims may have greater stability (until they don’t! Hence the minimum-width requirement for the tyre on any given rim), but I don’t believe you can feel the difference in normal cases, as can be inferred by observing what happens when you push a tyre on a narrow rim against the floor at a 30-degree angle off the vertical: it doesn’t bend sideways much despite the “lightbulb-shaped” chat.

Tyres wider than the rims risk preventable flow detachment with deep-section aero rims, but this doesn’t matter on shallow-section rims that had no hope of attached airflow to begin with.

[citoyen]

So old style Open pros were not exactly blessed with thick braking surfaces either but the new ones make the old ones look 'rugged' in this respect by comparison...

That's interesting - and not in a good way. I was looking at the new Open Pros as a possible option for a set of tubeless wheels but now I think I'll look elsewhere...

[Samuel D]

The new Open Pro rims are light for their width. I guess something has to give if that is the requirement, although Mavic has machined material away between the spoke holes to minimise the compromise required.

[Bianchi Boy]

I have gone with some Archetype 17mm internal width against the OpenPro 15mm . I could not go to 19mm. Was just a jump too far.

BB

[mzjo]

Question for Brucey really. In this part of the world LX17 (which would be my personal choice) and Velocity rims have to be imported, probably from UK (which I don't see as a particularly good option). Mavic have a near monopoly on rims for hand-building (and most serious riders seem to rely heavily on factory wheels, generally low spoke-count).
In this case what is your view of the budget Mavic rims (CXP22, or whatever it goes as now and Open Sport)? I don't think a single-eyeletted rim would necessarily be exclusive. What would the alternative Ryde/Rigida rim in the 17mm width be? Ambrosio Keba should be available I think but a bit wider (19mm from memory although that may just be the 650B version).

[hubner]

These are my recommendations, which are just as valid as anyone else's!

20mm rim - 20-25mm tyre
22mm rim - 22-28mm tyre
26mm rim - 26-32mm tyre

Rims measured the proper way, ie outside to outside!

[Brucey]

Mavic rejigged their range last year and I'm still getting to grips with the consequences in their budget/training rims.  Some of the rims appear to have just been renamed, others were replaced with similar models which are not as similar as you might think.

So the Open Sport is now replaced with the 'open elite' model and it is almost identical in most respects, so far as I can tell (not built with them yet). Similarly the CXP22 is replaced with a rim known as CXP elite. However the CXP elite, although clearly based on a similar if not identical extrusion, is a somewhat less useful rim than most of the CXP22 variants (there were at least three different versions).

The CXP 22 was made with and without single eyelets, came from Taiwan or France, had variations in (usually external) external wear indicator, weighed over 500g and usually had a braking surface well over 1.5mm thickness.  Problems were confined to occasionally rim cracking on the DS spoke holes (winter use on salty roads) and with the wear indicator groove, which occasionally did weird things with the brake blocks and once worn was often mistaken for a damaged rim.  I thought they were a pretty good rim for the money; not perfect but pretty good.

The CXP Elite is made in Romania, is a few grammes lighter in weight and they appear to have achieved this by machining most of the braking surface away. I have measured several rims and they had braking surfaces around 1.35mm thickness.  Whether it is the reduced braking surface thickness or some difference in the alloy heat treatment I cannot say, but the ones I have seen appear not to be such a robust rim as most versions of the CXP22 were; they may be softer. A chap I know (who has built loads of wheels) actually caused one to pretzel wholesale during stress-relief. I didn't see him do it and maybe he handled it like it was a CXP33 or something (which is much stronger for the weight) but he described the rim as 'surprisingly soft'. This may not bode well for robustness or rim wear longevity. I've built a few sets without issue (thus far) but I'd sooner have more braking surface thickness on this type of rim for sure.

BTW call me a luddite but I think machined braking surfaces are overall a daft idea. It makes it easier to produce a rim that is parallel-sided when new, even if the extrusion isn't quite straight, but the machined braking surface is rarely perfectly uniform in thickness (because the extrusion wasn't quite straight to start with) so the wear indicator isn't as reliable as you might expect.  In addition the quality of machining varies from rim to rim; many (most?) have swarf embedded in the machined surface, that then transfers into the brake block and then can cause extremely rapid rim wear. It is vital to check the brake blocks at regular intervals when using a new rim to make sure that this isn't happening. The braking surfaces on modern rims are almost invariably pathetically thin vs how they used to be; for example BITD Mavic made a rim called the Module 3, which weighed ~520g and had braking surfaces about 2.0mm thickness. Even the Module E2 (and later the MA2) had brake surfaces of ~1.6mm or greater, despite weighing only ~440g. You could have a training rim that was both cheap and good, then.  When they are machined these days, I think they remove the best (most fine-grained, work-hardened) bit of the extrusion.

So overall I am not that impressed with the current Mavic 'training rim' offerings; I think they could do better. Nonetheless I am hard pushed to suggest a really good alternative that is comparable price-wise.

I have not built with every other rim by any means so it is difficult to make a comparison in every case but the Archetypes are much, much stronger than other current rims of the same weight that I have built with. Whether they are really twice as good as the alternatives is open to debate; they are twice the price...   A wrinkle that can catch you out with rims of this general shape (from most manufacturers) is that the spoke tension can vary more than you might expect once the tyre is fully inflated.  You have to allow for this if you don't routinely build with pretty high tension.

You could argue that we are blessed with plenty of choice in rims at present, but the chances of finding a half-decent one are somewhat reduced, if anything, what with the love to tubeless (which makes most such rims a stupidly tight fit), machined braking surfaces, and some kind of a 'race to the bottom' going on...

Maybe others have some better suggestions and comparisons to make, but that is my take on it, anyway.

hth

cheers

[amedias]

Rims measured the proper way, ie outside to outside!

I'd generally prefer it if all rim widths were quoted inside to inside, since that's the metric that dictates the effect on the tyre, although you can also get some minor variations from the lip/hook profiles too.

ie: a 20mm rim vs a 21mm rim measure outside to outside might both have the same internal measurement and one just has thicker breaking surface or lip profile.

Better yet, quote both measurements for completeness

[citoyen]

So the Open Sport is now replaced with the 'open elite' model and it is almost identical in most respects, so far as I can tell (not built with them yet).

Am I right in thinking the Open Sport replaced the MA3? I rebuilt an old wheel last year, replacing a worn out MA3 rim with an Open Elite. They seemed much the same to me, as far as I could tell.

Happy enough with the Open Elite so far - at least, it hasn't gone out of true yet.

[Somnolent]

When they are machined these days, I think they remove the best (most fine-grained, work-hardened) bit of the extrusion.

I think you may be on to something there.  I've thought for a while that all my recent rims (Open Pros, Ambrosio Excellence, Archetypes) have worn on the brake track much more quickly than the rims of yesteryear.

[Brucey]

So the Open Sport is now replaced with the 'open elite' model and it is almost identical in most respects, so far as I can tell (not built with them yet).

Am I right in thinking the Open Sport replaced the MA3? I rebuilt an old wheel last year, replacing a worn out MA3 rim with an Open Elite. They seemed much the same to me, as far as I could tell.

Happy enough with the Open Elite so far - at least, it hasn't gone out of true yet.

yup to all intents and purposes (AIUI),  MA3= open sport = open elite

cheers

[Bianchi Boy]

The current crop of OpenPro rims last only one winter. I keep telling her in doors that replacing a rim is much cheaper than buying a whole new wheel.

Oh just taken delivery of the hubs for the rims. Campag Record are looking lovely.

Now just need the Archetype rims and the spokes to arrive.

With a fair wind could bell be seen on the BCM in a couple of weeks.

BB

[rafletcher]

H Son Plus aren't tubeless compatible but are cheaper than A23 and a similar width.

Yes, they are