American Classic has updated their mountain bike wheelset with a few new tweaks. Foremost is that the rim is now tubeless. I have a set of their All Mountain wheels, and I have used a rim strip to run them tubeless, and it was hit and miss getting tires to work. So the new tubeless rims are a welcome change. The rims come in either white or black, while the hubs are a very cool red! The new rims are wider, deeper and lighter, and the new geometry has increased stiffness. They come in both 26 and 29 inch sizes.

I had a very nice technical walk through of the new wheels by the President, founder, engineer and techno geek Bill Shook. Bill led me through some interesting engineering features of their products that relate to the wheels. The IS disc brake interface posts on the hub are slightly raised, which aids keeping the rotors from getting warped.

Instead of using brass nipples Bill uses aluminum nipples, which are extremely lightweight and hence reduce rotational weight. He extended the body of the nipple so that the threads go slightly past where the nipple is cradled in the rim, so that the nipple is held in compression instead of tension, which reduces fatigue and breakage.

While I was at their booth Jenny Fletcher, their sponsored triathlete was signing autographs, so I got one for my daughter, and of course I got one for my basement bike shop! Jenny was really nice, and down to earth, and we yakked on about training and such.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Daily Coverage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.