need new wheelset – build or buy?

[Tania]

@dkel 118841 wrote:

Be careful on those new wheels; that kind of change is what makes many people crash (myself included).

Thank you for the words of caution – I will heed your warning.

[Tania]

Only a few rides in but here are my luddite impressions (I say luddite because I’m not sure I’d feel the nuances of a nice wheel set even if it rolled over my head)

They’re smoother. This could be because my 28 tires on such fat rims look like 32s. I’ll be picking up 23’s this weekend.

It’s possibly mental, but climbing is much easier. I’m small, so a pound+ off total climbing weight makes a difference. We’ll see if that’s really true on tomorrow’s butt early hills ride.

You can REALLY feel the difference going downhill – I actually felt a little out of control (and got a little scared) barreling down two sisters this am.

[ShawnoftheDread]

Those Novembers are beautiful and tempting, but what would you all recommend in the $300 and under market? Asking for a poor friend with a concave brake track on his Aksiums. Velomine has Mavic Open Pros with Ultegra hubs for $325.

[hozn]

@ShawnoftheDread 120658 wrote:

Those Novembers are beautiful and tempting, but what would you all recommend in the $300 and under market? Asking for a poor friend with a concave brake track on his Aksiums. Velomine has Mavic Open Pros with Ultegra hubs for $325.

That sounds like a good deal. If the friend doesn’t care about weight, you should be able to also find Open Pros on 105 hubs for less. An Open Pro wheelset was one of the first I built (relaced my Formula hubs on my SS to Open Pro rims) and they were great. Nowadays I’m all snobby about wanting wide rims, but does it really matter? No. (And non-wide rims can be found a lot cheaper.)

I will say that one wheelset that I bought right before selling with a bike was Easton EA50. Those were really nice, “semi-aero” (30mm deep) wheels and at around $250 were very affordable. Cartridge bearings, good total weight and Easton wheels are/were (all?) handbuilt; didn’t have any issues for the thousand or so miles I rode them before selling. The only complaint I had was that it was hard to mount tires on those rims, but otherwise they were great. I had also set them up tubeless for ‘cross tires; that worked just fine (but setting up road rims tubeless is pretty trivial).

“Hand-built” isn’t a universal sign of quality, though; I remember buying some hand-built wheels from an ebay seller in CO and they were absolute crap. The spokes completely detensioned on me on first or second ride while riding through the woods (CX bike) and had to bust out the multi tool to tighten them down. Then I retensioned them and it happened again — I’m not sure what they had done with that build, but it was horrible. So maybe avoid ebay hand-built options.

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