Training wheelset - off the peg or handbuilt?

colm_gti

Want to pick up a solid set of training wheels today or tomorrow so I can retire the aksiums (that have seen better days) on my bike to the turbo....

My options are;

A) Something off the shelf (Campag Khamsin @ €144, Fulcrum Racing 7 @ €180, a new pair of Mavic Aksiums @ €225)

or

32h Handbuilt wheels (open pro on sealed bearing hubs) @ €250

If it was your money, what would you have?

Hmmzis

Where are you getting those prices from?

Just got a pair of Aksiums on for 162 form Merlin Cycles. A while ago got a pair of Fulcrum 7 for my GFs commuter for 145 (think it was also from the same crowd). They use UPS for delivering and it takes about 2-3 days in my experience.

Having tried both the Aksium and Fulcrum wheels I can say that there is not a bit of difference in them performance wise. The freehub on the Fulcrums is a tad louder I think and I sort of felt that the Aksiums are a little bit more compliant when it comes to absorbing road nasties (little bumps and broken up surfaces).

No idea about the Campy wheels, have seen then on quite a few bikes when on club spins so they would appear to be fairly popular.

Beasty

Surely at that end of the market you should always get better value for money with something off the shelf - they are less likely to go wrong also (and it's probably going to be less hassle if you have the manufacturer's warranty to fall back on)

Lumen

It's a question of ownership experience more than product.

Handbuilt are easier to true and do rim replacements.

Factory tend to need less truing but are basically a disposable product.

Campag wheels are supposed to be very strong.

€225 is way too much for Aksiums.

CaoimH_in

Fulcrum Racing 5s at 199 -- http://www.bike-discount.de/shop/k632/a81187/racing-5-black-white-shimano-8-9-10-speed.html?mfid=451

" Racing 7s at 129 -- http://www.bike-discount.de/shop/k632/a76966/racing-7-for-shimano-black-8-9-10-speed.html?mfid=451

I'd say Racing 5s sound like a fair deal ... Dunno what delivery is.

MediaMan

I got the 2012 model Racing 5's at a nice end-of-line price of about 170 from bike-discount back in August. Apparently the only difference for 2013 is the colour. Although they must be using magic colouring now because to quote from their description on bike-discount at the above link:

The new graphics and new white hub make the 2013 range Racing 5 a superior standard tyre type wheel.

:pac:

Anyway I am very happy with them. I did look at custom built wheels but decided that the cost was too much for my limited budget.

As an aside I am not so happy with the Rubino Pros that I put on the wheels, as they are very skiddy in the wet. Have nearly come off a couple of times while braking when the back wheel locked up :eek: so am going to have to change them.

bcmf

I love my Khamnsins but had this problem and easily solved it -http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056820175- and find that they can take a hammering.

sherlok

I have open pro's on sealed hubs (36 hole) and i've been riding on a pair of khamsins for the last 3 months while i get around to having a rim replaced.

i really can't pick much of a difference in ride quality. the open pros maybe feel a little more solid, but you'd expect that with all those spokes.

i'd happily buy khamsins again, and they're the cheaper option.

doozerie

It's six of one, a half dozen of the other. Handbuilt certainly means that, as long as your hubs are good, you can keep replacing worn out rims and re-use the same hubs (and perhaps spokes) for many years, without huge expense each time (usually!). But that quality of hub typically costs a bit more so off the peg usually wins out on cost.

What would swing the decision for me though is that if I broke a spoke or buckled a wheel while out on a long wintery ride, I'd want to maximise my chances of being able to get the wheel into a state where I could ride it home. There are obviously no guarantees, but in principle you minimise the risks of an un-ridable wheel with more (non-paired) spokes. That rules out some off-the-peg wheelsets straight off. And if you want to be able to source replacement spokes readily then that tends to push you further in the direction of handbuilt. It's often not so clear cut of course, there is certainly a lot of overlap there amongst handbuilt and off-the-peg, but add in the prospect of throwing an entire wheel in the bin when the rim bites the dust and my inner environmentalist screams that handbuilt is worth the extra cost. I also don't like that some of my factory-built wheels seem to come with spoke nipples either glued in place or seized (just not lubed perhaps) so adjusting those ones is a real pain, and even more so at the side of the road.

The flexibility offered by handbuilt can be a strong selling point too. You get to select the components, so you can choose hubs based on their reliability and ease of maintenance, spokes based on their reliability (I've been told that ACI spokes tend to survive crashes better than DT Swiss for example, which would make them more appealing to me if true), rims based on their durability. Again though, some off-the-peg wheels can provide everything that you need or want, and if you have no strong preferences one way or the other then handbuilts may lose some appeal on that score.

All of my commute wheels are handbuilt, and I have no inclination to ever choose off-the-peg for those - I like being entirely self-reliant, in so far as possible, for my utilitarian bikes. I've only come round to that way of thinking for "training" wheels quite recently though. In recent years I've ridden exclusively factory-built wheelsets on my "good" bikes and been trouble free (apart form the little hassle of finding a conveniently portable-sized spoke key for Mavic Ksyrium spokes). But despite that lack of bad experiences, I now look at those factory wheelsets as being potentially problematic and a cause of having to ring for a taxi when I find myself stuck on some mucky potholed little boreen miles from home in the middle of a wintery storm and with a wheel with just a single broken spoke in one hand. It's not entirely rational but I'm getting old therefore I feel entitled to a little paranoia, hysteria even, and phrases like "they don't make them like they used to when they made them by hand" just seem to roll off my tongue a bit more easily.