You right. I’m wrong here.
I really like my LB wheels though and will get more, the $1k price delta between them and a set of “name brand” wheels can buy a lot of tires or other goodies
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I destroyed a flyweight AR24 because I nailed a gap in the tarmac with probably 35psi in a 32mm tire.
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I don’t have a ton of experience with expensive carbon rims, but have had a couple pairs built up with Nextie and LB recently and they’re about as nice a rim as I could ask for.
Planning new wheels for the good hardtail. I really like the 27.5’s on my ss way more than I have ever like 29” on the hardtail. Is it dumb to go 27.5” at this point? Are tires going away?
My set of AR56:
I cased a square edged corner on some railroad tracks at ~30mph in a practice crit…. Twice…. Hard enough to pinch flat a tubeless gp5k. Each time triggered a wief-flight.
Cased a bunch of other things as well. Lots of curbs and such. Pretty sure I got >5k miles out of em. I don’t remember what I hit, but right before they died, I hit something that rattled my teeth, there was a crack and I was certain I’d broken the wheel and flatted, but no.
Couple days later, I was on a long descent and put some heat into the brake track at which point the rim let go in a non-catastrophic way. Basically started rubbing and lost some tension.
I was flabbergasted because by that point I thought they were indestructible. Needed to replace em any way because the brake tracks were starting to show wear.
I’ve killed lots of alloy rims, including a bunch of HED Belgium Plus with way less abuse.
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I hit an AR36 on the edge of a sharp and deep pothole hard enough to launch a water bottle, literally no discernable impact on the rim
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Oh, I dumped the front wheel in a pothole hard enough to go OTB. Wheel survived with non discernible damage. I’ve never actually killed a front.
Landed laterally on my 650b front on the gravel bike hard enough to snap carbon bars and pull the spokes out of the nipple threads. No discernible damage.
Ironically, or typically, I’ve never actually cased anything with the wheels into which I put inserts.
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Deep-ish section carbon rims do be pretty tough these days
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Even my shallow ones have survived harder stuff than what killed 3 Belgium Plus for me.
Do I seem salty about that? Because I am.
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Ok so I’m building new wheels soon, and I’m going to chicken out and not do Berd fiber spokes until there are more pre-slotted hub options out there.
So here’s my next brilliant idea: Titanium spokes - tell my why I should or shouldn’t use them for a road wheelset. Carbon rims, whatever hubs, brass nipples unless they play poorly with Ti.
edit: I’m trying to build a wheelset that’s a little outside my normal dt 350/cheap double butted spokes/LB carbon rims, but I don’t want to wind up with some total mess of garbage parts
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Paging @ergott
To spokes will be more stretchy than steel so need more spokes than a given steel spike build. I’ve done a few and decided they’re not for me. Only cool thing would be straight gauge titanium for the cool anodized effects.
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I’ve heard that Ti spoked wheels feel more “springy”, and that seems cool, but I’m less interested in a mess that winds up every time I accelerate or hit the brakes.
The plan is 28 2X on 55mm carbon rims.
Tensile strength of a straight gauge 13g titanium spoke is roughly similar to the tensile strength of a 1.8mm double-butted stainless spoke for around half the weight. A Pillar Ti Aero spoke, for example has a tensile strength of ~255lbs, whereas a 1.8mm spoke has a tensile strength around 288lbs. You’d save about 3g per spoke for a total savings of around 84 grams per wheel, not nothing.
My primary concern would be the fatigue limit of titanium. It’s hard to really model fatigue life, but there is a point, below which fatigue life is effectively infinite. For steel, this is anything below the yield strength. For titanium, it’s more difficult to determine, but somewhere between aluminum and steel in terms of fatigue resistance.
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as someone who used to bomb long hills on Vector Comps and early generation Ksyriums, I fear no spoke breakage beyond those I’ve seen already.
I kinda like the idea of a light, springy quality to a wheel, but not if it means doing 32 spokes on a 60mm rim.
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Ok follow up Ti spoke questions for anyone who feels like answering:
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Marwi? Pillar? Other? what should I get, what should I avoid? The price range seems all over the place, not sure about quality here.
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what’s up with tensioning Ti spokes? I’m trusting that the KgF limits set by rim manufacturers are not to be exceeded, and the tension table that came with my Park TM-1 includes a few entries for Ti spokes, is there any Esoteric Bike Wisdom about this that I’m missing?
The threads on WW and MTBR forums are reassuring on this front, they boil down to anecdote about good personal experience, plus (shockingly enough) some engineers having a slapfight.
nope, nothing you’re really missing. as far as the rim in concerned, tension is tension.
ti spokes being less common, I might be less inclined to trust whatever is on Park’s table, and more inclined to find some way to hang 100kg (or whatever your target tension is) off your exact spoke and see what the tension meter actually reads.
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this is a good suggestion, and in general I’d suspect that a 12 year old, relatively frequently used tension meter is probably not super accurate.
I was heartened that they bothered to include a couple of Ti spoke varieties in their chart in the first place