An outsourced post

An outsourced post

Surprisingly, we don't have a ton of conversations with people about hooked versus hookless rims. We've talked about their pros and cons before, like in this post from April 2020, but people ask if certain rims are hooked or hookless, we tell them, and life seems to move on. 

This recent CyclingTips Nerd Alert podcast does a great job of explaining all of the reasons why we're still big fans of hooked for a variety of reasons. The short version is that any rim that's likely to see a tire used for any kind of road application, we're still just profoundly more comfortable with hooked rims.  

Nerd Alert podcast: Confused about tubeless and tire pressures? You’re not alone. - CyclingTips

Another interesting bit on this comes at about minute 23, when guest Josh Poertner talks about how calling something optimized for a certain use case is usually off-putting to consumers and causes them to switch to other alternatives. We've experienced this so many times in so many ways. I remember several occasions where we were asked the weight of one build or another using standard parts like, for example, a 24/28 HED Belgium+ set with CX Rays and White Industries hubs and brass nipples, and we say that the weight is 1530 or whatever it was, and another builder says it's 1480. Guess who gets the order? Guess what the actual difference in the weights will be? Another one is weight limits - we're conservative and say that wheelset is appropriate for up to say a 210# rider. Someone else says yeah no sweat use it at 240#. Even though the components are no different, and we're insanely confident in our builds, guess which way that one goes - even if the rider is nowhere close to either weight limit.

Anyway, this is a great podcast and deserves a listen.   

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