Using 2 sets of wheels

Stuart123

Hi all,

Two questions:

1. If I were to buy a spare set of wheels, so that I had 1 pair shod with heavy, highly puncture resistant tyres and the second with lightweight road tyres, is there any potential problem with swapping them over depending on what I want for a given ride (could it affect brake setup and/or gear adjustment or will it "just work")?

2. What is the "best" bang for buck pair of wheels under 200 pounds? I weigh 70kg and I favour reliability/ ease of servicing / longevity over outright speed, but obviously want as fast a pair of wheels I can get for the money that doesn't compromise the other 3 qualities I listed.

Regards
Stuart

portuguese mike

to answer your questions in turn:

1) providing the rims are of the same material, i.e. alloy or cabon fibre then you won't h ave any problems (brake blocks pick up bits of metal from metal rims which will wreck a carbon rim). the only other thing is to make sure you don't let your chain wear out too much or it will affect the smoothness of our transmission particulary when you swap wheels (worn chains prematurely wear a cassette so when you put a different wheel on with a cassette that is less worn then it won't 'fit' as well as it should)

2) get a set of open pro rims built on to a set of midrange gruppo hubs (e.g. centaur or ultegra) with dt compettion spokes (you could spend a bit moe for revolutions which are quite a bit lighter and would result in a comfier albeit less stiff wheel - depending on your riding style)

i have two sets built onto mirage hubs with (32 front and rear) revolution spokes (i weigh 74kg) which came in under £200 and are pretty bombproof and weigh only 1,641g

maddog 2

depends on how often you want to swap and what wheels you've currently got on the bike.

If you swap fairly regularly, say weekly, then you could really do with wheels with the same rim, so you don't have to reset the pads and everything swaps over seamlessly.

Secondly, and perhaps a minor point, but if you run Shimano hubs on both wheels you can set them up so that the hub spacings are exactly the same, so that the cassettes are in the same place and you won't have any shifting problems.

For that price a decent set of handbuilts is clearly a strong option. eg. OPs on a hub of choice, and DT spokes/proloc nipples.