Latest Custom Builds — Wheel Repairs

Richard enjoys riding his older Cervelo a couple of hundred km a week. He's keen, but can't see the need to replace this eight year old carbon rig. When his Zipp hub exploded (be warned, if yours hasn't, it will!) he came to us to rebuild the 808 Carbon Alloy wheel with a new hub. As the Cervelo won't take a tyre wider than 25c, these older narrower rims work fine for his needs. We talked through a number of options, and finally agreed that a Bitex RAR series hub would be perfect. Inexpensive, reliable and very light.  Sapim plain gauge...

Chris was having trouble with his eThirteen wheels. He was breaking spokes constantly, and was just not confident that they would be up to the task for an upcoming MTB holiday. We disassembled the wheel and replaced all of the basic quality super light spokes with thicker and stiffer Sapim leader spokes, brass nipples and new tubeless tape. We sent him on his way. Within a week or so he called back with his front wheel. He was so impressed with the improved ride quality of the rebuilt rear, that he asked us to do the front!

  Andy has quite a few sets of wheels from us. He's been really happy with them, so contacted us when he realised that he had ripped the valve out of his 27.5+ e-bike wheel.   A natural choice for mid quality alloy rim replacements (for OEM products) are from AleRims. In this case we needed a strong rim with a 40mm internal width. The MD40 is the perfect choice. Certainly not expensive, and the quality is great. We laced the rim up to his Shimano Deore Centerlock hub with Sapim Leader plain gauge spokes and brass nipples, and used...

The latest in our "shittohit" series of projects, the XLR8 Wheels 2001 Trek 2300 is finally getting a complete rebuild. The bike came to us with a Shimano WH-6600 rear wheel. We are not a fan of the radial driveside lacing (makes no sense whatsoever) and the rusty old spokes (that were now well beyond their fatigue life). We found a nice old 20 hole Ritchey Zero hub in the used hubs drawer, and calculated the spoke bracing angles using our own developed spoke length, target tensions and bracing angle calculator. As the wheels were originally offered by Shimano with driveside radial lacing and...

A customer dropped by the workshop to see us in the middle of this Mavic Aksium Race wheel rebuild. He asked why we would spend all this time on an older mid level factory wheelset?Like much older Mavic, these wheels were 11s capable from before 11s was a thing. The hubs are very reliable (though not super light). This particular set of rims had seen very little use, but the spokes had become rusty (whilst sitting in storage) and started breaking.We replaced the basic rusty flat bladed spokes with lovely new Sapim Sprint straight pull spokes (a bit thicker Race on...