Here at JRA we’re always on the lookout for new wheels and the 3 days of the Interbike show didn’t disappoint with the usual mix of nice developments and a few ideas which will hopefully never get as far as the bike shop shelves.

One product that you probably won’t be seeing in a bike shop near you are the new XRC330 carbon rims from DT Swiss, not because there is anything inherently wrong with them but at a not-particularly revolutionary 330g and a wallet-bending $770 PER RIM there will be a limited number of buyers. On the positive side the rims looked really good, with a nice glossy finish, they are certainly way lighter than anything from Mavic or the rest of DT’s range and according to the DT guy they stand up well to normal XC use. They will be offering a wheelset based on the 190 ceramic hubs, Aerolite spokes and RWS skewers for $3300. Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if you bend it on a rock.

Someone should have told DT about the new Stan’s NoTubes ZTR Race rims, which at 290g (some versions even lighter) are easily the lightest mountain bike rim out there, with a load of nice design features such as increased internal width and lowered sidewall for increased tyre stability and lighter weight. Maybe we’re biased but of all the wheel/rim manufacturers at the show it’s Stan who seems to be pushing rim development in the right direction by continually developing a few good ideas and getting them into production. It’s hard to see in the photo but check out the massive width of that tyre bed, it’s like that to hold the tyre firmly with minimal risk of burping and the thin sidewalls increase the effective rim width to something like 25mm for loads more stability especially when compared to Mavic’s 17mm on light XC rims. We’ll be getting some in soon, expect the price to be only a little more than the ZTR Olympics and for sub-1200g wheelsets to be achievable.

Industry Nine have been bubbling away under the radar for a few years and now look to be growing into a major contender in the lightweight wheelset market. Their lightweight hubs have 6 pawls with 3 degree pickup (the quickest out there, as far as I know) and thick anodised aluminium spokes available in pretty much any colour you care to mention, there are even multi-coloured options available at a price. The spokes don’t use any nipples and drop in through the rim, screwing in at the hub end which will save rotational weight not to mention being easy to build. Price is high end but nothing ridiculous, we expect it to be comparable to or slightly more than a good DT 240s build. Starting somewhere just over £500 I reckon.

Back to the realm of things they really shouldn’t have bothered with, we find the new Crank Brothers wheelsets. OK so they’re tubeless and the wheels come in various bright (some would say garish) colours but in order to avoid having to seal up spoke holes they’ve come up with a rim with big ugly flanges, weird paired up spoke patterns and 2-piece spokes which start at either end and meet in the middle. Unnecessarily complicated, weaker than a conventional spoke pattern, unfinished-looking valve hole and not light weight compared to a normal rim with normal spokes, Crank Brothers set out to solve one problem (maintaining a sealed UST rim) but introduced a whole bagfull of new ones. The only reason to buy these is if you value bright blue anodising above performance.

A few booths along the aisle we found Cole Wheels, not a company I’d heard of but they seem reasonably big. Their main mission seems to be to eliminate spoke breakages, “by far the weakest link in a wheel is the spoke” well they have a point but conventional spokes today are pretty awesomely strong and don’t need strange cyclindrical spoke heads and holders. Nice idea but a bit overkill and over-complicated. They looked cool in a retro shiny sort of way though.

Talking of retro and shiny, Phil Wood was showing the usual range of utterly bomb-proof, with a weight to match, shiny hubs. But what really caught my eye was the spoke cutter, you hold a spoke up to it, pull the lever and hey presto one perfectly cut-to-length spoke. The idea is that you only need to stock a couple of spoke sizes thus saving money by not holding tons of redundant spoke stock but at $3000 for the machine you’d need an awful lot of spokes to make up for it. It’s an awesome machine though and one I’d like to have for show if nothing else.

We’re not really into road wheels at JRA but one which did catch our eye was the uber-light 363g Topolino carbon tubular wheel. Amazingly it felt like something you could actually race on although at $5500 the pair even the DT Swiss rims are looking bargain basement. It was astoundingly light and the guy really seemed to know what he was talking about so if you’ve got the money, why not? They have no plans to make an MTB version, probably a good idea as they acknowledged the limitations of applying ultra-light carbon roadie technology to bish-bash offroad use, especially clincher rims where the sidewalls can just snap off if you hit them hard enough (or get a flat).

Quick blast through the rest of what we saw… Cane Creek are not making any MTB wheels any more, and are just producing these fancy (weird) flanged-hub straight pull items for road and track. Fulcrum were showing some wheels with twice as many spokes on the drive side as the non-drive, kind of pointless. They like many others were doing a UST rim, their valve stem looked remarkably identical to our Eclipse valves.

And that was about it for the wheels at Interbike 07. Any questions or corrections, comments below please…