Wheelset Upgrade

mccutchie

Guys, i'm looking at upgrading my current wheelset and I have narrowed it down to 4 options.

Pro Lite Bracciano-S
Mavic Ksyrium Elite
Fulcrum Racing 3
Mavic Cosmic Carbone Sl.

I would compete in the odd race not many. Most of my riding is club cycles and sportives, which i do many. I'm looking for a wheel that rolls fast but is strong and reliable.

The Carbones look the biz, very bling bling, but i'm concerned they are not a 12 month wheelset. Also how do they perform in windy conditions, that would be by main concern as alot of my cycling is around the west. Are they less stable than the others in our climate ? Appreciate your feedback and opinions. Cheers

Diarmuid

By all account the Cosmics are very good wheels and would hold up well. However you seemed to have a very wide range of prices there, You'd get 4 pairs of Braccianos for one pair of Cosmics. For that sort of price differential, I'd be trying out the Braccianos' first

DirkVoodoo

Most sportives in Ireland tend to be quite hilly, with averages rarely breaking 30 km/hr. You won't see the aero benefits of the cosmics and will curse the extra weight (they are about 100g lighter than a set of aksiums) on the climbs.

Not to mention crosswinds! I'm about 66Kg and yes, I felt the front wheel buck a few times in crosswinds or when a lorry overtook.

Personally I would take a nice lightweight wheel over an aero wheel for your type of cycling. Carbones wouldn't even enter the equation.

mccutchie

Thanks for the opinions guys, yes the carbones look the biz, but with the majority of cycling i do being sportives and club cycles, my head is telling me they are not worth the investment, plus issues with crosswinds would just drive me nuts.

cantalach

I'd agree that the Cosmic Carbone or any deep section carbon wheel would not be suitable for your requirements (or mine for that matter).

People like to use the word 'bombproof' a lot when talking about the Mavic Ksyrium range. But as I have discovered, this is a load of bollocks. This was the second problem I had with the same wheel (the other was unrelated) and the experience has put me off Mavic a bit I must say.

The Pro Lite Bracciano seem to have gotten a lot of very good press and they are a very good price. Thanks to them being available at a very good price locally here in Cork, a few of my cycling buddies are now riding on them and I haven't heard any complaints so far.

One thing to keep in mind as well as the road conditions is your weight. Some wheel models have a 'clydesdale' variant with extra spokes (e.g. the Easton EA90 has the SL variant and most of the models in the Hed Ardennes range have a clydesdale variant afaik). For the sake of a few extra grams, wheels like these are worth considering for Irish roads.

Lumen

cantalach wrote: »

Hed Ardennes

Avoid!

On an unrelated note: anyone want to buy a set of HED Ardennes?

cantalach

Lumen wrote: »

Avoid!

On an unrelated note: anyone want to buy a set of HED Ardennes?

Really? Tell us more. Why have the rave reviews got it so wrong?

Lumen

cantalach wrote: »

Really? Tell us more. Why have the rave reviews got it so wrong?

Heavy rim, light hub. The end result is sort of stiff and floppy, in all the wrong ways.

They felt nice enough when they came out of the box, but after a few hundred kms the spoke tension is all over the place and I can wiggle them between the brake blocks.

Still, bikeradar can't be wrong, and I would be happy enough to part with them for €700. :pac:

Eamonnator

Hi Guys. This is my first post. I've been looking at the site for a while now,
and finally decided to take the plunge.
I am 100kgs(I think, this qualifies me as a "Clydesdale"). I bought a set of Fulcrum racing 3 wheels, last year.
They are light and very strong.
I have completed a number of sportives on them, including this year's "Tour de Foothills". I have ridden about 5,000 kms on them. I cannot praise them enough.

cantalach

Lumen wrote: »

They felt nice enough when they came out of the box, but after a few hundred kms the spoke tension is all over the place and I can wiggle them between the brake blocks.

Sorry but I have to ask...are you sure that lateral play isn't just that the bearings need to be adjusted (if the Ardennes bearings can even be adjusted). When what you describe happens with Mavic wheels, you just tighten the bearings by a quarter turn using the crappy little plastic tool that comes with the wheels and the lateral play goes away.

Lumen

cantalach wrote: »

Sorry but I have to ask...are you sure that lateral play isn't just that the bearings need to be adjusted (if the Ardennes bearings can even be adjusted). When what you describe happens with Mavic wheels, you just tighten the bearings by a quarter turn using the crappy little plastic tool that comes with the wheels and the lateral play goes away.

Possibly. I took them into well regarded Dublin bike shop who consider themselves to have expertise with wheels and they sort of shrugged and said the design was unusual and they didn't know what to do with them.

I need to take them back down to Spokes in Waterford (who AFAIK) are the only official HED dealer in Ireland.

edit: also, I haven't had to do this with any of my other wheels. I don't own any Mavics, but I hear they're bombproof.

Raam

Lumen wrote: »

I don't own any Mavics, but I hear they're bombproof.

They ain't Gorey proof though. Spoke go ping!

levitronix

Sounds like he needs a set of tubs !!!

doozerie

@Lumen, If the spoke tension is bad on your Ardennes then you may well be able to easily detect it by ear just by plucking the spokes one by one. A musical ear helps when trying to gauge whether spokes are correctly tensioned, but very poorly tensioned spokes are often obvious to even the tone deaf due to the horribly dead sound they make. If your rim is rocking that much, and if it really is due to poor spoke tension, I'd expect that it should be very audible when plucking the spokes, you might even feel the lack of tension in some spokes as you work around the wheel. Pick any other wheel that you consider to be in a reasonable state and pluck its spokes to give you an idea of what decent tension sounds like.

More generally, as for Mavic being bombproof, I'm not convinced of that even though it gets said a lot. I've been riding Mavic wheels for years - my first set were hand-built ones (not built by me) with Mavic hubs and rims and they were excellent and lasted for many years and many many miles; my next set were factory built ones (Cosmic Elite) which were problematic and poor value; my current set are Ksyrium SL's that came with my Canyon but they've not had enough mileage yet to swear for or at them. In the meantime I've been through quite a few Mavic road and MTB rims that I've built up myself on a variety of hubs. My experiences have been a very mixed bag with some rims (Open Pro) being mostly very good, and some rims (MA3) being consistently poor. This has taken the shine off Mavic stuff for me. I'll continue to use Open Pros on road wheels that I build, and probably XC717 on MTB wheels that I build, but next time I buy a factory-built wheelset I'll be looking for something other than Mavic. I think it has been quite a while now since Mavic were practically the automatic choice of decent wheelset as there are many very good alternatives readily available these days and some of them for less money too.

As to the original post, I've been riding a set of Pro-Lite Luciano's for several months now. My initial impressions were good, and for such a low-end wheelset I was very impressed by the smoothness of the bearings. Only in the last few days though I've had issues with the rear wheel moving about in the drops. I've had to tighten the skewer more than I'd like and I think the bearing are starting to feel a bit rougher than they should for their level of use, not helped by cranking down the skewer of course. Maybe dismantling and re-lubing the skewer itself will resolve the movement issues though and that'll take some pressure off the bearings. Until I've had a proper look though I'm going to hold off on saying any more great things about these particular Pro-Lite wheels and it would make be wonder about how the Bracciano's would fare over time too. Hopefully it'll prove to be a simple problem with a simple fix though.

Before I bought my Luciano's I looked at a number of alternative wheelsets and I was impressed by what I read about the Fulcrums. I have no direct experience of them whatsoever but I was ready to buy a set of Fulcrum Racing 3's before I decided to take a chance on the Luciano's. The Fulcrum Racing 1's looked very good too but obviously for a lot more money - I reckoned the Racing 3's were the best value for my purposes at the time and up to a few months ago they were available at a very good price on some sites (I didn't keep the links but I think I posted one of them in a thread here a couple of months back).

nomadic

Sounds like the Pro Lite Bracciano's are your man.

I bought a set of pro lite merano's a couple of months ago for about €150 on ribble and the're excellent wheels for the money. I have also got a pair of racing 3's which were excellent wheels but didn't survive being hit by a 4x4. I think I'm going to get a pair of Soul S2.0's to replace them. I might get another pair of racing 3's too. You can never have too many wheels.

cantalach

Lumen wrote: »

edit: also, I haven't had to do this with any of my other wheels.

I don't doubt that. But for the record, I also own a set of Campagnolo Zonda wheels and I had to get the bearings adjusted on them once too (more difficult than with Mavic hubs so I left it in to the shop). Bottom line is that unless I'm just very unlucky, loose bearings aren't all that unusual, and the symptoms are as you describe.

cantalach

doozerie wrote: »

I'll continue to use Open Pros on road wheels that I build

Just to go off on a slight tangent here...I've seen people say in a few places that Open Pro rims can make an annoying 'click' sound with each revolution after a few thousand kms. Have you experienced this at all?

seve65

anyone any experience of the kooka carbas ?

doozerie

cantalach wrote:

Just to go off on a slight tangent here...I've seen people say in a few places that Open Pro rims can make an annoying 'click' sound with each revolution after a few thousand kms. Have you experienced this at all?

No, I've never experienced that.

I do have that issue with another Mavic rim though, but that's because some muppet* dropped a spoke nipple into the rim during the build and forgot to take it out.

*...yes, it was me...

doozerie

Sorry, still a bit off-topic...:

The best quick way to check for play in the hub/bearings is to remove the wheel from the frame and try to wiggle the axle by hand. A very small amount of play can be fine, as the stress applied by clamping the wheel in the frame should eliminate that (though the effectiveness of this may vary according to the type of hub/bearing), but if bearings are the root cause of a rim that can rock from one brake block to the other then I'd expect to feel a significant amount of play in the axle - mind you, I'd also expect to feel that amount of play, if it is there, just by rocking the rim while the wheel is in the frame though.

It's a good opportunity to check for roughness in the bearings too, by holding one end of the axle in each hand and spinning the wheel. Any slight roughness usually becomes very obvious when you do this.

The only things that spring to my mind that might cause such rocking in a wheel are: play in the axle but I'd expect this to be noticeable; a broken axle (bit of a long shot there but a broken axle caused me some odd issues in the past until I figured out the root cause - not easy to diagnose when dealing with sealed bearing hubs); skewer not holding the wheel securely, which is my current issue with my Pro-Lites and was actually more difficult to spot than I would have expected; poorly tensioned spokes; some issue around where the spokes sit in the hub; knackered spokes. Some of those are relatively easy to remedy, some others are a warranty issue I'd expect.

mccutchie

Thanks for all the responses lads, and the detail, very interesting some of you're experiences. I'm going for the Mavic Ksyrium Elite or Fulcrum Racing 3, whichever I can get the best deal on. Anyone know of good deals at the mo on either, feel free to shout.