For a problem that shouldn’t even exist…
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The upgrade is nice, but a real upgrade would have been bringing all the wheels back to a hooked design. If that upgrade happend the need for a traffic light on your wheel would not be neccessary;-)
Jeroen
3 Likes
Where is the upgrade to these? Hookless is also supposed to be lighter. Their “light” wheelset is 1300 grams, in a world where i can get a wide 50-60mm wheelset that costs less at that weight. They probably ride nicely, but even ignoring hookless, there’s no world where I’d consider buying or recommending these to someone.
Maybe I’m a retrogrouch, but that’s why I’m stocked up on 15+ year old hooked Zipp clinchers (and rim brakes).
Ya. Right there with you. Getting ready to pull the trigger this week on a Mavic wheelset that checks all my boxes.
I’m not at a level that warrants spending significant money on an upgraded bike, but I will spend good money on upgrades to my current bikes. My old Shiv and old P2 will likely serve me well for the remaining few years I have in triathlon. I’d rather put money in to good parts for them than spend money on an entry level current bike.
Which Mavic wheelset are you planning on getting?
Mavic Cosmic Pro Carbon SL UST. Found used on Fleabay that look pretty nice. Rim brake, tubeless ready, Shimano hub. Checks all my boxes.
Anything I should watch out for?
The difference between editorial and consumer opinions is quite telling, IMO.
Most editorials either split the difference (“not sold yet, but Zipp makes a compelling case”) or outright says that hookless is just as good (“the limitations on hookless are beyond most use cases”). I get it, you can’t just trash a product and expect the manufacturer to ever work with you again. But it’s very telling when the preponderance of voices NOT being given free test equipment come down reliably on one side.
There’s a price point at which hookless becomes a viable risk-adjusted purchase. But it’s not $1,600. For that price I can buy 4 carbon hooked wheelsets from AliExpress and throw away 3 of them if they don’t meet quality standards. And TBH I’d be more confident overinflating a Chinesium carbon rim than a hookless rim. Most of the products I’ve seen are overbuilt rather than underbuilt.
Maybe if Zipp offered hooked for $2,000 and hookless for $1,000 they’d get some buy-in. But a couple hundred dollars off on a $10,000 setup isn’t worth the risk for anyone except people who aren’t thinking and just buying based off brand recognition.
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Zipp (Sram) deserves to go out of business for this crap. If it wasn’t for Canyon forcing these wheels onto consumers via Sram groupsets there would be next to no one riding them anyway.
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Does anyone actually know the numbers of Zipp wheel sales in terms of as-part-of-a-new-bike vs. standalone-wheelset. I know people who legitimately don’t know their wheels are hookless, just that they came with the bike. I don’t know a single person who’s bought a wheelset knowing that it’s hookless.
Rim wear/rim thickness. Have a check for any concave wear on the rim and / or the wear indicators.
That’s of course on top of any visible cracking on the rims/hub and you’d want to give them a spin to check they are true. Lastly give all the spokes a little tap, flick - all the spokes on the front should sound the same, the ones on the back should sound the same on each side (drive and non-drive will sound about the same but different to the other side). Any single spokes that are ‘dull’ are untensioned and any that are noticably ‘brighter’ are tensioned more and that’s not ‘right’ - suggests someone has done a quick job to re-true.
I’m buying (maybe) from a reputable fleabay store. At least they have 98+% positive rating. They claim to check all the wheels before they put them out. Of course, I would give them a once-over before mounting them.
And just checking- you know you will need to get new brake pads for these wheels, and not use those pads on any of your old alloy rims.
Sorry it seems like teaching you to suck eggs, but offered with good intent. The little shards of metal from normal rims will rip the carbon to bits, that’s why you can’t share pads. And needs a different material to get the grip and control the heat on carbon vs alloy/ceramic rims.
This is my big issue with hookless. Set up and used properly, these wheels are perfectly safe. However, the safety factors involved are just too small for how little education there is on what these rims are and how to use them. A 2x burst factor is fairly standard on safety critical pressure vessels, at least in aerospace; if the ISO standard should require something more like this.
I will say the zipp 303 and 303s wheelsets are pretty popular, and fairly nice wheels for mixed road/gravel use. I know a lot of people with these.
Yes. Already running carbon on a couple of my bikes. Already have the carbon pads. Good to go there.
1 Like
This integrated pressure sensor, do you really want to know. Say you’re in an Ironman race and you see the pressure dropping a bit but the sealant closed the hole. I don’t want to know and worry whether the sealant will hold or not. I want to find out after I finished the race.
don’t include it in you head unit fields then.
you don’t need to know your speed or power either if you don’t want to
98% is not a good rating on eBay.