Seb’s been at it again, filming during practice at one of the best DH courses in the country (at least, south of Scotland anyway) – Bala, also known as Rhyd-y-Felin. It’s a fast course, with some riders hitting 63kph (!) on the fast fade jump at the top. You might recognise some parts of this course from most recent mountain bike movies such as Seasons, and anything to do with Clay Porter.

Movie not embedded? Click here to view on YouTube.

At last they’re here – the NoTubes Alpha 340, Stan’s first foray into the world of road tubeless rims. The high pressures used on the road makes special high strength carbon beads essential to keep the tyres on the rim, but since Hutchinson solved that problem a Stan’s NoTubes road rim has been inevitable.

Despite all the work that’s gone in to the road rims it’s cyclocross riders who’ve been pestering us the most about these rims. The ability to reliably run normal CX tyres tyres as tubeless is something of a holy grail for ‘crossers and that’s where our test set of Alpha road rims will be heading – offroad.

We’ve built some onto some American Classic 105 and 205 hubs with Aerolite spokes and I’ll be fitting them with some Maxxis Raze CX tyres to start with. Price of wheelsets comes in at £637.20 with the American Classic Micro 58 front hub, or £677.70 with the 105 front hubs as shown here.

The samples we’ve weighed come in at just 357g each on average (4 weighed, 352g to 366g). The braking surfaces are machined flat for consistent braking and they’re tubeless compatible by running two layers of Stan’s 21mm yellow tape round and fitting the dedicated Alpha valve stem.

Seb Frost is one of our team riders. He promised to make some nice movies if we supplied him with a GoPro HD camera and chest mount, so we did. This is his first effort from Todtnau in Germany, following Jim Coneron on some classic fast Alpine DH trail action.

Seb uses the American Classic hubs and NoTubes Flow rims, has earned his Expert category race licence and he also runs rootsandrain.co.uk. Embedded movie not showing above? Click here to view on YouTube.