I bought a cheap set of ICAN wheels off of ebay. $330 cdn shipped to me. 50mm carbon clincher. came with the usual, rim tape, brake pads, spare spokes, crappy skewers. threw away the skewers and put a decent set in instead, and I was honestly amazed. I used to run zipp 404 tubulars and had very low expectations. Of course I've only had them for a couple months, but they're a solid wheel with a decent weight and a killer price. I paid almost as much for the wheels as I did for the tires and tubes from my LBS.
Wayne

55 inches?

You should have purchased the tires and tubes from an online bike store in the UK.

In my experience, this is woefully incorrect.

But I'm also resigned that there is absolutely, positively no way those that purchase Chinese knockoffs will ever be convinced otherwise.

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Trent Nix
Owned and operated Tri Shop
F.I.S.T. Advanced Certified Fitter | Retul Master Certified Fitter (back when those were things)

Hey,

Any evidence other than experience? its easy to say Zipps look better. Dont get me wrong just trying to hear from a guy that handles bikes on a daily basis ;)

(I have Zipps Mavics, chinese wheels and a rear wheel that i built using vision hub and 80mm rim. Im actually waiting for a 80mm clincher pair)

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S�rgio Marques
When it hurts is when it feels good ;-)
Sergio-Marques.com

You would think if this were true (that the Chinese wheels are so bad) there would be tons of horror stories on the net-I cant find any??

I actually feel it's more like 50% of the performance, at least for the ones that I have. Mine are 50mm Deep V which is a pretty old technology but when you are riding 650's you can't be too choosy.

Not a Chinese wheel... used to ride a set of Farsports on my road bike... replaced with a set of HED Jet 6+. Great set of wheels that I didn't spend much money on. In terms of the Farsports... they are 50mm/23mm wheel with Novatec hubs. They are light and stiff, stopped as good as any other carbon wheel I've ridden. No idea how they stack up aero wise and as pretty much anything Chinese.. unsure about QC and customer service IF I needed it is going to be difficult.

The issue I had with them was trueness... not awful but I had them trued a few times as my road bike doesn't have much clearance and brakes scrubbing irritate me. I still have them for spares but came upon a great deal for a set of HEDs.

I digress a little... I was in a pretty serious accident with a wheel failure... it was a Zipp wheel. Stuff happens... nothing is 100% but I ride Flo's on my TT bike now. Nonetheless serious accident, back fractures, concussion, cuts, etc. with various medical expenses with a $$$ wheel failure.

I've been riding a generic set this year with upgraded DT Swiss hubs and CX Ray spokes and they have been fine. I have a Zipp 404 hanging in my garage that came apart under normal use. I'm going to need some evidence to believe that Zipps are 4-5 times better.

Same... except my moment of normal use was at almost 40mph. Honestly I think we both have our evidence.

Nope. Typo. They are 50 inches deep.

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http://dontletitdefeatyou.blogspot.com

I have been looking at some myself. Last race I was at - I would say half of the deep carbon wheels were chinese no branded wheels.

My take on it:

You can buy the half million dollar Ferrari with exceptional customer service and quality control and be that awesome guy at the race and everyone will be impressed you can afford it and you know it is reliable

OR

You can buy the 1990's Toyota Tacoma single cab that was made overseas with the dropped in Chevy 350 crate engine with 3 on the floor from a 90's firebird and has some frankenstein axles and rear diffs - everyone will think you are a joke - the truck MIGHT blow up on the quarter mile track but it also might make the Ferrari look like a play toy.

Me? I like a little excitement in my life. I am going with the truck. It is worth it to rub it in the face of the Ferrari once I win. "Cute car, too bad I beat you". It is also a laughable story if "Oh man, I am glad I had health insurance because I almost lost my leg when my truck blew up haha"

... Errr... Nuther typo? 50 millimeters?

You haven't seen a penny-farthing disc wheel yet?

Your post is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Every time Chinese knockoffs are brought up, inevitably those for (and against) them create a false choice - normal function or complete failure. That's a pretty low bar for success if one deems Chinese wheels sufficient simply because "I have been riding them for years and they haven't failed".

The fact is, most riders aren't putting very much stress on their wheels. They don't ride fast enough, brake enough, descend enough, or stress the wheel enough to approach conditions where wheels might fail. And as others have posted on the thread, buying Zipp (or whoever else) doesn't make you immune to wheel failure.

But the statement I objected to was about performance, not safety. And in my limited experience, we tested a Chinese Zipp knockoff (40 to 50-ish mm depth) in the wind tunnel and found it performed worse than even stock options such as the Mavic Aksium. Undoubtedly, considering there are hundreds of knockoff options, it's likely at least a few test welll. And it's possible we just happened to test the one wheel that sucked.

But to believe that knockoffs provide 99% of the performance is to believe that the entire wheel manufacturing business, a business that employs very smart engineers who work very hard to improve performance, reliability, and aerodynamics, is a scam. I believe that is simply not the case.

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Trent Nix
Owned and operated Tri Shop
F.I.S.T. Advanced Certified Fitter | Retul Master Certified Fitter (back when those were things)

I don't know about this. Regular pulley wheels in your derailleur provide 99% of the frictional performance of the CeramicSpeed option, and the price discrepancy is massive. That doesn't make CeramicSpeed a scam, because the information is knowable.

Your testing notwithstanding, the other false choice here is Zipp/Enve vs. China crap. There is a middle ground out there in Williams/Irwin and others in that $1200 price range. How many grams of drag am I losing in the Zipp 808 vs. William 8x mm wheel? 20? 200? I would guess the former. I don't know how we are defining 99% (relative to what baseline) but if we're talking about 20 grams relative to a baseline of the entire drag of your wheels, we're in the high 90s, for sure.

Opening a can of worms here, but you have been around a lot of wheels...

Racing Chattanooga full in a month. My race wheels have been a set of Chinese 88mm V section wheels. I have raced on these a bunch, and they have felt good. Still true after close to 1000 mi on them.

I also have a set of Bontrager Aeolus 6.5 that currently sit on my roadie. They are lighter for sure, but do you think there will be an appreciable difference in aero? In your experience are a name brand wheel that much better that a shallower rim gives similar performance to a deep rim from a knock off mold?

I have been debating this internally all summer... the Chinese wheels are nude carbon, and so is my bike, and they look REALLY good together, but do you think I'm sacrificing performance there?

It’s truly impossible for me to guess. Do some field testing.

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Trent Nix
Owned and operated Tri Shop
F.I.S.T. Advanced Certified Fitter | Retul Master Certified Fitter (back when those were things)

I'm going to call bullshit on that.

Holy crap. I am struggling. I shouldn't post early in the day. They are 50-freaking-millimeters!!! Aaaaggghhhh......

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http://dontletitdefeatyou.blogspot.com

Bingo!

Call it whatever you like. We paid our way to the Texas A&M wind tunnel a few years ago and did our own testing. We learned a lot. It was expensive. John Cobb went with us to show us the ropes. Here's a look at our trip if you'd like to at least validate we went:

http://www.trishop.com/plano/aerodynamics

Our testing wasn't scientific (although our wheel testing was the best controlled testing we did) so the data isn't suitable for publication. But we did try to do some analysis and here's what we found with Zipp 404 vs Stock Wheels vs the chinese wheels we used on a Felt IA (integrated cockpit) with no rider:



This data should be taken with a grain of salt, and we had ZERO expectations about how the chinese wheels would perform. We didn't control for tires. We didn't get multiple data sets to validate a run. The entire purpose of our trip was educational.

We expected to get performance somewhere nearer the Zipps than the stock wheels, but our findings were the opposite. The knockoffs performed virtually identical to the stock wheels.

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Trent Nix
Owned and operated Tri Shop
F.I.S.T. Advanced Certified Fitter | Retul Master Certified Fitter (back when those were things)

I think trentnix comment is legit. This is my n=1 experience... I bought a set of wheels on ebay thinking they were genuine. They were Chinese knock-offs. But they looked great. I mean, they looked and felt completely real. Like someone mentioned, customer service is "no thing". I had a hard time returning them, so I decided to keep them. Now I have ridden them over 10k miles. They still look great! I've hit many potholes - some very bad. They don't appear to be compromised. But like trentnix said - just because the wheels are working doesn't mean they're 99% functional relative to a premier wheel. I'm a heavy guy (185 lbs) and I have noticed that the rims flex causing brake rub when I really power up hills. Well, that kinda sucks.

Now... were the wheels worth $400? Absolutely.

Would I buy another set for $400? Probably not.

You never know what you're going to get with Chinese wheels. In fact, when the time came, I DID NOT buy another set of Chinese. Instead got some FLO wheels and I love them as well! They seem really fast and don't have that little bit of extra flex like the Chinese ones. So yeah, to trentnix's point. Just because they don't blow up doesn't mean that they were "worth it". There are other factors that are difficult to measure.

Might not want to "lock-n-load" in the wee hours of morning then. Or at least resist the urge to aim-n-squeeze until you've had some coffee.

Well that escalated quickly...

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http://dontletitdefeatyou.blogspot.com