Just one month ago, Praxis rolled out a wide range of new cranksets and micro chainrings. Now they’ve rolled out an entirely new collection in the form of carbon-rimmed wheels, moving their product family in a whole new direction.
Starting with the C32 mountain bike wheels, they designed their own carbon rim to be just wide enough for modern tastes without going to extremes. It measures 32mm inside / 38mm external and 26mm deep. They’re laced with 32 spokes per wheel and get a hookless bead. The width has been tested with 2.25 to 2.5 wide tires from Maxxis, WTB and Specialized tires all airing up without a compressor.
They’ve also got a new carbon wheelset for cyclocross and gravel…
They went with 32mm because it was a good middle ground to get a good tire profile with currently available tires. It’s a custom mold, using a bladder mold construction with the bladder removed after curing to save weight. The layup was designed to provide impact resistance and is reinforced at the nipples.
The C32’s have a 3mm spoke offset to reduce dish.
One unique (and very welcome!) feature is a flat section at the valve hole. That lets the tubeless valve stems sit flush with the rim surface and seal better.
The RC21 is their wheel for ‘cross and gravel tires. As the name suggests, it’s 21mm wide on the inside. It also has a hookless bead design and uses the same hubs and lacing pattern as the MTB wheels:
Hubs use a custom shell with beefed up flanges so they could run high spoke tension. That lets them use radial spoke lacing on the driveside up front, which they found made a laterally stiffer wheel. But because they’re using 32 spokes, they don’t need quite as high tension as a lower spoke count wheel, so it shouldn’t be overly stiff radially. The hub internals are DT Swiss 350 with their 32-tooth star ratchet.
Comes stock with thru axle end caps but will have QR and other options. Standard 142 and 100 spacing, not Boost at launch.
Retail is $1799/set for both versions, available early summer.
