29inch:When Customers Become Guinea Pigs There’s an interesting thread going on in the fat-bike fo
29inch: When Customers Become Guinea Pigs There’s an interesting thread going on in the fat-bike forum of MTBR. I purchased a set of Nextie 38mm carbon road rims for my Volagi Viaje and they’re a quite impressive pair of rims for the price. Obviously, I have no long term experience with them yet, but that’ll hopefully change. Anyway, this winter carbon massively invaded the fat-bike community with a bunch of bikes reaching bike shops and a whole bunch of rims promising more width and less weight. China-based Nextie jumped on the bandwagon and designed a 90mm wide fat-bike rim based on suggestions by a rider not associated with the company. Information leaked onto the web even before they had produced molds and Nextie documented the making of the first rims on their Facebook page. The resin of the first prototype had not yet fully hardened, when they started shipping rims to excited customers, eagerly volunteering to be guinea pigs while paying full price. I’m honestly pretty excited about that 90mm wide rim myself, but astounded at the same time how totally untested material can leave Asian factories. While they put a few prototypes through a couple of mechanical strength tests, they never took the time to mount a fat-bike tire, not a single one, never laced them up and never put them on a bike for a few real-life test rides. Sure, they’re fairly inexpensive compared to others and one could argue that you get what you pay for, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m glad that there are others willing to be guinea pigs. Not that much could go wrong with a large, sturdy rim, but at 268 dollars a pop, several more hundred for hubs and spokes, there’s quickly over a thousand bucks in something untested. I hope they’ll approach future developments more slowly and keep their stuff out of the public eye until it’s tested and ready for the mass market. They may be experts at manufacturing things in carbon, but as long as they’re not also experts in the sport, they need to find folks who are. -- source link