We gave a set of these black anodised alloy 24mm rims a thorough pasting over the summer, and our conclusions are a little mixed.
On one hand, they’re usefully light at 450g a piece and are arrow-straight prior to building – a big factor in building a wheel that’s straight when you’ve finished.
However, we’ve incurred some dings and both rims have required truing on several occasions, which was a surprise because their I-Beam construction should make them resistant to bending.
Fitting tyres was relatively easy without tools – an important consideration if you’re a racer needing rapid tube changes. Ours were built with double-butted spokes and brass nipples for durability.
We were able to get good spoke tension on them, although we’d have liked to see steel eyelets on the spoke holes to help resist the tendency alloy rims have to develop stress cracks over the long-term.
The rims feature WTB’s own Global Bead System (GBS), which uses deeper grooves to allow a more secure interface between rim and tyre bead; useful if you’re going to convert to tubeless.
The 19mm-wide internal channel sets up a round profile on tyres over 2in wide, but we thought tyres over 2.3in became a bit unstable during hard cornering.