It goes without saying that cyclists come in many shapes and sizes and strengths. A 135 pound climber probably doesn’t need the strength of a wheel built for 220 pound sprinter. And now, with the advent of the off-the-rack wheelsets, we have to be careful of weight limits when purchasing our equipment. It makes sense to have a wheelset built for you and your riding style rather than buying a set that is designed to work for “most people”. For that reason, we are going to start offering custom wheelsets for sale. As part of this process, we are building up some wheels for our rental fleet that customers can demo when they rent one of our bikes, or on their own bikes, if they choose. Why offer custom wheelsets? There are a ton of benefits to custom-built wheels. Here’s a partial list: We will be offering only aluminum rims on our wheelsets, initially. We are not enamored with carbon rims for everyday riding for reasons that we’ll get into in another post. Our current favorite is the Pacenti SL23. It is a 24mm wide rim that is tubeless clincher compatible, and it is available in 20, 24, 28, and 32 hole drillings. Weighing in at 450g per rim, it is lighter than comparable rims, and we find that it builds up into a light, strong wheelset. We can also build wheels with rims from DT Swiss, HED, Velocity, and Stan’s. Shown above is one our first wheelsets. It features DT Swiss 240S hubs laced 2 cross to the Pacenti SL23 rims (24 hole front/28 hole rear), using Wheelsmith double-butted spokes. Total weight of the wheelset (minus tires and skewers) was just over 1500g. We’ve mounted up the new tubeless clincher from Hutchinson, the Sector 28, and have been riding the heck out of them ever since. We now have well over 700 miles on this set and they ride great and have stayed perfectly straight from the start. The price of the wheelset decribed here would be $1100 and would include skewers and rim tape.