What Comes Next?

Two weeks of silence on the blog hasn't necessarily been golden. We announced the end of the Nimbus Ti program, got super busy with the season, and then we suffered a profound personal tragedy (my dad died) all at once. So I've pretty much had my head in a blender the past two weeks, fortunately Mike has been able to pick up most of my slack and our ace shop help has been a huge assist in keeping us somewhat normal. 

So what next?

With the Nimbus Ti setup going away, we are transitioning to a series of baseline builds, centered around our most popular builds. Pacenti and HED rim options will be joined by the Kinlin XR31T. The XR31T is a great rim that's been around for a while, and if Kinlin had named it "our new proprietary aluminum rim" instead of XR31T, a lot of noses would stop growing. It's deep, it's wide, it's stiff, it's fast, it's tubeless ready. 

Since the big two questions we get after "how many spokes do I need" are "can I get Nimbus Ti with black hubs?" and "can I get Nimbus Ti with CX Rays?" we are basically turning those into "yes" answers. Price will be a little bit higher for black and a little higher still for CX Rays, reflective of the increased costs, but they'll still be excellent values. We continually seek to tune our strengths to best suit what the market wants. 

The main hubs will still be from White Industries and Chris King, but we'll also be adding some options from Bitex. Bitex hubs are a nice lower cost option that still offer solid performance, durablility, and ease of maintenance. 

Our impression of the component market, in particular with regard to aluminum rims but also very much in hubs, is that we can provide profound value in helping people select the wheel build that will be best for them, putting them together better than others do, providing best in class service, and keeping the price very reasonable, without needing to go out and literally reinvent the wheel. The component market has all the options you'd want already, so for us to do a new alloy rim to split the hair even finer would make no sense.

We've also got some neat feature builds on tap. Those have been a big hit and though it's not incredibly easy to come up with unique and worthy things all the time, we've got some good ones on deck.

We finally have Rail 52s in stock for immediate builds. Almost more than ever, we think Rails hit a nexus of speed, depth, width, manageability, tubeless readiness, braking performance, price, and weight that's the best final answer on the market, so of course we're continuing with those more enthusiastically than ever.

Though we've been quiet about the process as it's unfolded, we're close to a big update on the Range wheels. Again, we've got a unique product that does a bunch of things better than any option out there, so going off on our own has been necessary to get the product we wanted for that. For a few reasons, it's been a more challenging gestation than we'd anticipated, but we want to make sure that it's 100% ready to go from the first moment. More news on that soon.

Thank you to everyone who's been quite patient with wheel deliveries over the past couple of weeks. This is the hardest curve that life has ever thrown me, and having cool customers has made the difference between getting through it with some modicum of grace and me sticking my head in an oven.

Last, as regards my dad, I don't want to eulogize him here. I did that yesterday and it knocked me on my ass. He was an awesome person and hopefully we continue to make him proud with what we're doing here.