Deep carbon fiber aero wheels



Monday! Time for more pics of CCC (Cheap Chicom Carbon)! There are literally thousands of these failures, but tommy gets da good stuff! Way mo' bettah than Campy for 1/10th the price! LMAO!

upload_2018-11-12_6-24-13.jpeg
 
oopsie!

carbon-bike-wheel-fail-3.jpg


Chinese carbon wheel warning. Avoid carbonspeedcycle at all costs!

Here are some updated pics to my front wheel explosion.

Just re-iterate, this happened under normal riding conditions, and under normal load and did not involve any bumps or crashes. I was actually about to stop, due to a rear wheel puncture, when the front wheel just exploded due to the tyre pressure. It was a hot day — 28C — and relatively high pressure — 115PSI — but this still should not happen. I was actually running super lightweight race tyres — 160g Schwalbe Ultremo ZLX — and the fact the rim gave way before the tyres shows how weak they were (or how good Schwalbe tyres are?)

My advice: avoid ebay seller carbonspeedcycle and anything from a seller called Helin Liu on AliExpress (or anywhere else).
 
  • Like
Reactions: James Crum
Bulges have started forming at the spoke holes on my Chinese carbonwheels. Interestingly, unlike a number of posts I've read, the bulges are forming on the sidewalls, not on the inside surface of the wheels. Has anyone experienced this?

314789d1466810150t-bulges-spoke-holes-carbon-wheels-photos-bulge2.jpg


But, baby! I saved big money by shopping on ePay!
 
PansyBob is scared to death of carbon fiber wheels. Or is that he is scared to death of carbon fiber wheels that don't cost 10 times as much that use the same components? Doesn't this remind you of https://www.bing.com/images/search?...5BF2C117A527CA517B3F18B4B0E44BA2A&FORM=IQFRBA

You certainly are one miserable person aren't you. What's the matter, isn't your mother talking to you anymore? Then maybe you ought to get a job and get out of her basement.
 
Last edited:
blah blah blah...

Good luck with your next head injury, cupcake! Killing your last surviving brain cell will be an event we want to celebrate.
 
My Venn wheels have been bullet proof since I've owned them. They've survived a few big crashes, plenty of bad roads including racing over cobbles. I've owned some **** carbon wheels including the junk sold with Giant bikes, however these ones are pretty damn good.
 
"The recommended retail price is USD 919 for Venn Rev 507 TCC and USD 949 for Venn Rev 507 TCD."

Decent prices.

I sold my November's. Brake tracks went to Hell quickly. The guy that bought them almost immediately cracked one when he hit a step / level change in the pavement.

I'm happy with my Mavic's for now. I'm always on the lookout for a bargain carbon spare set.

And yeah, there's a metric **** ton of *****ing about Giant's OEM carbon wheels on the internet. Lots of cracking issues and even more spoke/nipple pull through.
 
My Venn wheels have been bullet proof since I've owned them. They've survived a few big crashes, plenty of bad roads including racing over cobbles. I've owned some **** carbon wheels including the junk sold with Giant bikes, however these ones are pretty damn good.
As long as you use the proper carbon wheels brake pads you won't have any problems other than the pads wearing out pretty fast. If you use aluminum wheel rubber brake pads you end up with the carbon fiber burning through as PansyBob was attempting to imply was a normal wear pattern.
 
LOL LMAO!!! Dang CampyBob you were on a roll on that one, that was fantastically funny.

Bob, I tried sending a note to the Mod about Tom about a week ago and no response. A guy like Tom shouldn't be allowed to be on a forum where a new person to cycling will read and believe what Tom is saying and get steered in the wrong direction, lose money, damage his equipment, possibility even get hurt. But I guess the mod don't care?
 
LOL LMAO!!! Dang CampyBob you were on a roll on that one, that was fantastically funny.

Bob, I tried sending a note to the Mod about Tom about a week ago and no response. A guy like Tom shouldn't be allowed to be on a forum where a new person to cycling will read and believe what Tom is saying and get steered in the wrong direction, lose money, damage his equipment, possibility even get hurt. But I guess the mod don't care?
What is hilarious is that yesterday I spend about three hours trying to get a set of Mavic Kyserium Elites installed in a Trek. The original Bontrager aluminum wheels hadn't just cracked at the spoke holes but had pulled the entire area around the spoke out of the rim. These were two year old wheels.

The Mavic wheels which will do the same within a year, had the tire well far too shallow and the the bead wall was so shallow that it took both of us to start the tire on. I had to use talcum powder on the inner tubes and it was so difficult to fit the Panasonic tires on it that I went through 5 innertubes to get them without pinch flats.

As with most shop work that has been done by so-so mechanics the brakes were improperly aligned and spaced. And the new Kyseriums luckily included the 11 to 10 speed cassette spacer. Chinese wheels not only come with the spacers always but also spare spokes and nipples.

The Mavic sealed bearings rolled with so much friction it was embarrassing to the owner since my terrible Chinese wheels with the cheapest hubs available would run for several minutes on a flip. The Mavic only 20 seconds or so. I could have gotten my wheels with ceramic bearings and they would then roll twice as long on a slight flip. With any luck his sealed bearings will loosen up with use but they may not depending on the exact sort of seals.

I had tried to talk this man into buying some cheap Campy wheels but he listened instead to advice of someone like Froze and was very disappointed at the results. Hopefully he can get at least a year out of the wheels before they crack around the nipples. Five friends all have had exactly the same failures with these wheels in the same amount of time.

Moderator Note : edited for abusive content.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
 
CampyBob is showing failed carbon fiber wheels. Since all of these wheelets but a very few are made in China by the same company and are distributed in the US by different manufacturers under different names you should not accept his claim that it is "cheap chicong" wheels that are failing. The single picture of nipple pulling out of the rim does appear to be a real, though uncommon, failure. His other pictures for the most part are because instead of using carbon wheel brake pads they were still using the rubber brake pads which were overheating and burning the surfaces off. And there are a couple of failures obviously caused by collisions. The wheel that is broken in the radius is questionable. It appears to be new and so this could easily be a quality control problem and no one has managed to solve these problem yet. Venn has increased the weight of the wheels to that of Campy and the other manufacturers who have reverted to using aluminum rims and carbon fiber fairings. At this time the wheels are in general all being built like the Campy Bells or Bora by the big name manufacturers who want to avoid lawsuits.

If you are scared witless of carbon wheel failures than perhaps you should pay $2,250 for a wheelset that is built in the same factory as a Chinese secondary seller who will sell the exact same wheel for $325. That will give you added confidence if not an moments more safety. For that you should go to the fully aluminum wheels of Fulcrum. Bypass their large selection of fully carbon wheels and go to the racing 1 and the like. These wheels are not Aero but they are a great deal cheaper since the entire business is switching over to those super dangerous (according to CampyBob) fully Carbon wheels.

My point is that all wheels wear out if they have rim brakes. Carbon wheels with disks are likely to have as long or even longer lifespan as well built aluminum wheels. And because of this I would expect rim brakes to disappear from everything but TT bikes.

It is your choice. Or you can take CampyBob's scare tactics which he is posting without any real comments about the situation.
 
"For anyone reading the above post from "cyclintom , do not take his word for anything, as he frequently posts inaccurate or misleading information that could be potentially dangerous. Make sure that you double-check everything using reliable sources of information before making any decisions that could result in physical or financial harm to you or anyone else. We don't think he does this maliciously, he simply doesn't know what he's talking about and refuses to listen to anyone who attempts to correct him, so don't waste your time. Unfortunately, he seems to be a lost cause."
 
oopsie!



Chinese carbon wheel warning. Avoid carbonspeedcycle at all costs!

Here are some updated pics to my front wheel explosion.

Just re-iterate, this happened under normal riding conditions, and under normal load and did not involve any bumps or crashes. I was actually about to stop, due to a rear wheel puncture, when the front wheel just exploded due to the tyre pressure. It was a hot day — 28C — and relatively high pressure — 115PSI — but this still should not happen. I was actually running super lightweight race tyres — 160g Schwalbe Ultremo ZLX — and the fact the rim gave way before the tyres shows how weak they were (or how good Schwalbe tyres are?)

My advice: avoid ebay seller carbonspeedcycle and anything from a seller called Helin Liu on AliExpress (or anywhere else).

The additional reason not to buy Chinese stuff :)
 
1000miles2.JPG
The additional reason not to buy Chinese stuff :)
If you bisect almost any carbon wheel you will find the same voids. That thing that looked like a plastic bag is the inflatable form that is used to achieve that shape of the rim.

After 1,000 miles on my Chinese wheels with the proper brake shoes they show almost no wear. I wear lightweight aluminum rims completely out at about 2,000 miles. And their wear markers are completely gone at 1,500.

The wheelsets that CampyBob was touting were the narrow rim Campy wheels like the Neurons and Neutrons. I would break those wheels in a single ride and had to buy down for a wheel that would wear a reasonable amount of time - Campy Protons. I still have a set of Campy wheels of that type in my garage. A Neuron front and a Proton rear. I still have the Neuron rear that I broke twice before retiring it. I didn't get five rides out of that wheel.

The Campy Sirocco was available at $300 in a CX version and I got a set of those but they aren't sold anymore. They are wearing well but they are not light and they are not aero and they are in fact so bad that on one ride I was on a climb with a new group of guys and it was REALLY windy. I came around a turn and the wind was blowing so hard that it blew me to a stop and I had to dismount. When I did the wind picked up my steel Basso and waved it like a flag. I had to wait for that gust to stop before I could remount and finish the climb.

Under identical conditions I felt absolutely no loss of control with the aero carbon wheels that were 20 mm deeper than the Campy wheels. The line on the bottom is not from the brake shoes but was the original molding mark of where the brake surface starts. There is a light marking on the braking surface you can see. Now the Basalt brake pads DO wear pretty rapidly and have to be replaced pretty often - I think this is the second set in 1,000 miles so you have to keep them in proper adjustment in order to prevent that sort of marking that you can barely see.

So if you don't want to buy those "cheap Chinese" wheelsets because you don't trust them that is fine but don't take the word of someone that goes out on the Internet and finds the worst examples of what can happen if you used the wrong brake shoes. After all, you can go out on the Internet and discover all sorts of broken carbon fiber bikes. Tell the pro's today that they shouldn't ride carbon fiber because it will break. In most of those Internet horror pictures in almost every TdF failure since 2012
1000miles2.JPG
it was from collisions and not arbitrarily failure.
 
Last edited:
View attachment 3481
If you bisect almost any carbon wheel you will find the same voids. That thing that looked like a plastic bag is the inflatable form that is used to achieve that shape of the rim.

After 1,000 miles on my Chinese wheels with the proper brake shoes they show almost no wear. I wear lightweight aluminum rims completely out at about 2,000 miles. And their wear markers are completely gone at 1,500.

The wheelsets that CampyBob was touting were the narrow rim Campy wheels like the Neurons and Neutrons. I would break those wheels in a single ride and had to buy down for a wheel that would wear a reasonable amount of time - Campy Protons. I still have a set of Campy wheels of that type in my garage. A Neuron front and a Proton rear. I still have the Neuron rear that I broke twice before retiring it. I didn't get five rides out of that wheel.

The Campy Sirocco was available at $300 in a CX version and I got a set of those but they aren't sold anymore. They are wearing well but they are not light and they are not aero and they are in fact so bad that on one ride I was on a climb with a new group of guys and it was REALLY windy. I came around a turn and the wind was blowing so hard that it blew me to a stop and I had to dismount. When I did the wind picked up my steel Basso and waved it like a flag. I had to wait for that gust to stop before I could remount and finish the climb.

Under identical conditions I felt absolutely no loss of control with the aero carbon wheels that were 20 mm deeper than the Campy wheels. The line on the bottom is not from the brake shoes but was the original molding mark of where the brake surface starts. There is a light marking on the braking surface you can see. Now the Basalt brake pads DO wear pretty rapidly and have to be replaced pretty often - I think this is the second set in 1,000 miles so you have to keep them in proper adjustment in order to prevent that sort of marking that you can barely see.

So if you don't want to buy those "cheap Chinese" wheelsets because you don't trust them that is fine but don't take the word of someone that goes out on the Internet and finds the worst examples of what can happen if you used the wrong brake shoes. After all, you can go out on the Internet and discover all sorts of broken carbon fiber bikes. Tell the pro's today that they shouldn't ride carbon fiber because it will break. In most of those Internet horror pictures in almost every TdF failure since 2012View attachment 3481 it was from collisions and not arbitrarily failure.

I was just a reader and never a participant till now, but have noticed a lot of errors written by one person in particular on various subjects, and now you all have this misinformation about aluminum rims not lasting long by Cyclingtom, where he states he only gets 1,500 to 2,000 miles on aluminum rims before they wear out. Now I'm sure everyone here on this forum has got to know this information isn't correct, how many of you here that ever used aluminum rims only got 2,000 miles on a rim? I would like to know this from ALL the forum members what their experiences have been with aluminum rims life expectancy minus crashes of course, just normal wear and tear. I'm I the only one that gets 30,000 miles average on aluminum rims? Maybe I am the only one that gets over 2,000 miles on a rim since no one bother to refute what he said.

So Cyclingtom what do you do to your rims that you wear them out in only 2,000 miles or less? You realize that you're not suppose to use 40 grit sandpaper for your brake pads don't you?

And how in the world do you break a wheel in a single ride? how old are you? 20's I assume? are you some sort of hugely muscular guy that just torques the **** out of bikes breaking bikes and wheels? I've never known anyone to do that in that short of time period. But I guess others on this forum must be breaking wheels as well after one ride because no one refuted it.

I will say that generic Chinese CF wheels have improved over the years, but there's more to that equation then build quality, the other part of the equation is the horrible lack of customer service and warranty service. If you buy a generic Chinese CF wheel you have to realize that the financial risk something breaking due to manufacture defect is entirely on you, they will not send you a new wheelset and they will not repair the old one. If warranties and customer service is important to the purchaser than I would suggest buying a wheel from a known manufacture. If a person decides to go the cheap generic chinese direction you need to do business of Ebay using PayPal, those two things will offer you some limited protection but better than no protection if you go directly to a seller. Also you need to make sure you buy from a seller that has thousand or more favorable reviews; once you find a seller and they have a 'brand" label you need to google that "brand" and find out what their reputation is. I'm not going to show you pics of failed wheels, anyone can do that for any product, I once found a failed Moots TI bike does that mean their bad? no of course not, but at least Moots stood behind their warranty and the frame was replaced, this isn't going to happen with a generic Chinese CF rim. Another thing is if you go too cheap with these Chinese rims and buy from a non established EBay seller you do indeed take a huge risk of failure which could have serious implications for your health and well being.

Cycletom has said some other very weird stuff on other threads here that I've read over the last year or two, some of which was argued extensively by others and rightfully so, I'm not going there, just came here to question his lack of miles on aluminum rims statement, and to make clear the risk of buying a generic rim out of China.
 
Okay, I'll jump in on this one. I have never worn out a set of aluminum rims in my life, and I have several wheel sets with more than 20,000 miles on them. I average 500-750 miles per month, so I would go through a set of wheels in 2-3 months if the lifetime was only 1500-2000 miles. And, my brakes get plenty of use -- I live and ride in the Rockies.
 
...I would like to know this from ALL the forum members what their experiences have been with aluminum rims life expectancy minus crashes of course, just normal wear and tear.
My commuter saw 6000+ miles/year. In a climate where winter means 4 months of sanded and salted roads. I haven’t kept a log but I must have been getting more than 3-4 years out of each wheel. And that’s starting from used wheels usually.

I was getting less in my early years of MTBing. Difficult singletrack, lots of mud. Short, sharp descents and corners made for frequent braking. But 2000 miles would mean I’d have needed new rims about every season, which certainly didn’t happen.
 

Similar threads