Bicycle wheels. They’re one of the most important components there is in cycling. Without wheels, your bicycle will be much lighter, but it will also be much, much slower, and it will handle very poorly. So yes, while there are certain situations when you may opt to forego the front for weight savings, generally speaking you want to always make sure your bicycle is equipped with two round wheels:
[If you ride without a front wheel make sure you substitute it with plenty of love.]
But which wheels should you choose? Well I can’t help you there. Frankly, in the age of dick breaks and 32-inchers and tubeless and all the rest of it I’m hopelessly lost and out of touch. For example, based on this headline, I infer that for many cyclists a $4,000 wheel isn’t absurd:
Wait, it takes a $1,400 wheelset to make a $4,000 wheelset look absurd? What if you think $1,400 is absurd, where does that leave you? What if you’re like me and want your wheels to be as boring as possible?
The wheels above are the best ones I currently own. I got them from Paul at Classic Cycle…maybe seven years ago? By my standard they’re exotic because they have Campagnolo Record hubs, but otherwise they’re a snooze-fest, and as far as I’m concerned that’s the highest level of praise you can bestow upon a wheel. They’re currently on the Roadini, but I’ve used them on many bikes, and I’ve switched the freehub body back and forth between Campagnolo and Shimano, which on this hub is very easy to do. Aesthetically and mechanically they are the embodiment of What A Bicycle Wheel Should Be.
Of course as an aging Fred, I understand the appeal of hot rod wheels. For example, a really light pair with a total of like three spokes does feel really fast:
I even had crabon wheels on the Tan Tenovo, and those felt really fast too, though I did discover they were slowly eating my tires:
But ultimately after dalliances such as these I always find my way back to boring, because hanging out with someone who likes to party is one thing, but you don’t want to marry them.
Anyway, here’s the “Bicycling” article about the wheels:
He does acknowledge that even a $1,400 wheelset is expensive, which I appreciate, and the rest I’m too old and slow to care about, though this did stand out:
My biggest complaint was the rear hub. I loved the silver finish, but the freehub is incredibly loud and has a high-pitched tone that I found more irritating than most loud hubs. That is subjective, but it was easily my least favorite part of the wheelset.
I’m glad he acknowledged this too, because I hate–absolutely loathe, detest, abhor, etc.–the way wheels sound today. It’s horrible. HORRIBLE. Seriously, do people know how goddamn horrible their ridiculous raspy plastic bikes sound? THAT GOD-AWFUL RATTLING!!! It’s like something’s broken, it’s embarrassing. How could you pay that kind of money for a bicycle component and accept that it sounds that way? It would be like paying $5,000 for a pair of speakers that only plays the sound of cats fucking.
I’m old enough to remember that period when Kysrium wheels used to howl when the freehub went bad. If it happened to someone during a race you were terrified, because it sounded like an elk was dying. But by modern wheel standards that sound was positively musical, and we’ve now reached the point where a functional wheel sounds worse than a malfunctioning one.
Speaking of the Kysrium, it came out in 1999, and it is absolutely the wheel that’s responsible for the current state of affairs:
Of course there were expensive, exotic wheels before this, such as the Tri Spoke and the Spinergy Rev-X, and of course Mavic had already been selling the Helium, which really helped kick off the whole ready-to-ride complete wheel thing. But the Ksyrium was the first wheel that successfully convinced the Freds that they should use an expensive, proprietary wheel all the time, for everything. And once they adjusted to that, the Ksyrium became a “training” wheel and they had to use something even more expensive and exotic for special events. The upshot was sort of a reset whereby race wheels were considered training wheels and normal wheels with normal rims, hubs, and spokes were considered garbage. In those days a decent pair of traditional wheels might have cost $300, whereas the Ksyriums cost more like $900. So basically thanks to this one wheel the price for what people considered a “basic” wheel tripled overnight.
Anyway, as a former semi-professional bike blogger and current gentleman bike blogger I’m also completely out of touch with what stuff costs now:
But according to a quick consultation with a popular search engine, the price of the Ksyrium of Yesteryear is equivalent to about $1,600 today, so I guess in that context the wheel in the review is in fact “a good deal.”
Still, I’m happy to be an aging rim brake enthusiast, because even if you don’t want to build a wheel or have someone else to do it you can get a decent quality normal wheel like this for like a quarter of what those Light Bicycle wheels cost:
I have a couple pairs of these and they’re pretty good. Butted spokes would be nice, which they don’t have, but Shimano 105 11 hubs are great, and they’re backwards-compatible with pretty much everything–plus they even work perfectly with 11-speed Campagnolo:
Don’t let the clashing colors fool you, this bike runs smoother than warm Pepto-Bismol.
And the rims even work with tubeless tires if you’re into that, though that does come at the expense of truly easy flat repair if you’re still using tubes.
Meanwhile, ironically, the radical-for-its-day Ksyrium now comes in a “Heritage” edition:
Note the inflation-beating price, which is about what the originals cost back in 1999.
Hey, they’re practically free!