Following my 'incident' at Basildon a couple of weeks ago I found myself needing a new front wheel.
To be more accurate, I destroyed my old wheel - a trusty, Mavic MA3 rim on Deore hub with the manliest of spokes - a heavyweight that was built for 'cross.
So, accepting a replacement wheel was required, the thought processes began. Having some very nice, generous clubmates, there was no shortage of offers of loans, but as everyone knows, your own kit is best - you just don't want to trash someone else's. No alternative - I definately needed to buy a new front wheel.
Being a typical bloke and cyclist, I rationalised that to mean I needed a pair of wheels and started trawling the internet, gazing longingly at all kinds of circular weaponry before realising this was an emergency expense, was not budgeted for and frankly, if you stick me, a new set of wheels and a cross bike together something is going to break eventually - probably sooner rather than later. No point spending hundreds!
A clubmate, Tony Sheppard, mentioned to me that Planet X were selling pairs of CX wheels for £99 - this got me looking at the budget options.
Despite the massive increase in sales of CX bikes and growth of the sport, if you google "cyclocross wheels" you get very little of use apart from some nice looking Campag stuff. So, I started researching what "road wheels" were available and what standard wheelsets were offered on "off the shelf "cross bikes.
It took a while, but I eventually had a match.
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| The rather nice Kinesis EVO4 |
Kinesis are well known in CX circles, particularly for great value performance frames, but they also sell complete, off the peg rigs. These bikes come with Shimano R500 wheelsets (WH-R501 to be geeky).
Reasoning that if a company with the reputation and Cyclocross expertise of Kinesis can offer this wheelset as standard it must be OK, I did some more research.
Merlin Cycles came up trumps - one pair of said Shimano R500 wheels for the princely sum of £72.95. P&P was about £6 but having ordered on the Sunday night, they were with me by Tuesday morning - very efficient.
A pair for £72! Being me, this very nearly became the perfect excuse to buy another pair for the pits, but I resisted my natural urges and stuck to the cheap option for once. One pair was actually twice as many as I "needed" anyway. If I was having this dilema closer to Payday, I might easily have ended up with 2 pairs.
The wheels were also in great shape - namely round and true. After a week of good use, they still are.
Some might consider them a little heavy, but this wheelset also came as standard on my Cannondale roadbike, with the only difference being colourscheme and spokes. These ones from Merlin with beefy stainless steel spokes - no bad thing in my book considering the beating they are likely to get over the coming months.
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| My new wheels in the wild |
They also look quite nice on my bike.
I'll let you know how they fare over the course of the season.
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