Road wheels for racing CX

Mombee

Rather than change my Kinesis Pro3 Crosslight, which is proving to suprisingly reliable, I'm tempted to stick with the frame and upgrade some of the components, starting with the wheels which are Shimano RS10's. I'm running 31mm Vittoria tyres at the moment and can't see myself going wider for the winter, so is there any reason why I couldn't pick up a good set of road wheels (either secondhand or heavily discounted) and use them for racing.

roger_merriman

possibly CX wheels have better sealed hubs etc.

if your racing you have to assume you may break bits so in all probability this is less of a concern.

Chris James

Lots of people (most?) just use road wheels. However, when buying wheels I would consider how 'good' you want them to be if you are using rim brakes, as heavy braking through sand pits and the like can wear rims at a pretty fast rate.

From what I have seen there are basically two camps of cross racers. One's like me who race cross for fun with parts cascaded down from their other bikes, that you aren't worried about destroying. And ones who target cross racing who run carbon rims and tubs (nowadays often with discs).

If you are planning on sticking with clinchers then I would personally keep running the RS10s until the brake track is worn out. Depending on how muddy the races you do are you will probably need to re-grease the hubs, but that is pretty simple with cup and cone.

woolwich

You'll be fine on road wheels.
However one thing to consider is rim width. The modern trend is for wider rims, they give substantially better off road performance in terms of grip and feedback than say a more traditional 14mm road rim.
Whilst it is totally possible to run a wide tyre, say 30mm or so on a narrow rim, things can get kind of squirmy when you start experimenting with low pressures.
As Chris says, all depends how serious cx is for you. If your not aiming for a top ten slot, just about anything will be ok.