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.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.
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.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?
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).
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.The additional reason not to buy Chinese stuff
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.
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 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.
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