Alto Cycling’s moved quickly to take their year-and-a-half old hub technology and move it over to a disc brake design, first for road and cyclocross, now for mountain bikes. And it’s not just their hub technology that makes them unique, they’re among the (if not the) only ones to use EPS molding to create their carbon rims. The result is near perfect compaction with smoother inside walls and more consistent and controllable wall thicknesses.
The hubs use precision machining and extremely tight tolerances with special sealing designs to yield very stiff and very smooth rolling hubs that feel as if they have no friction. Hit up our original story for all the tech details on their hubs, and check out the mountain bike wheels below…
Externally, the hub is differentiated by their oversized flanges, which provide a wider effective bracing angle. Bearings are pushed as far to the edges as much as possible. The mountain bike wheels use the same disc hubs as their cyclocross wheels.
The mountain bike wheels will be offered in carbon and alloy. The carbon rims are hookless and tubeless and use the EPS molding process (see bottom of post for more on this). Complete weights for all versions are TBD, as are rim weights, but they said expect the 27.5 front wheel to come in at just 630g.
They’ll measure 30mm wide outside, about 27mm inside, and be 28mm deep. Price is TBD, probably around $2,300, but production starts in December.
Alloy wheels use a Velocity Blunt SS rim that’s custom drilled so the spike hole angle is at the correct bracing angle for their hub’s taller flanges. Expect these to be very light, also, with hub weights of 115g front and 270g rear and a Blunt SS 29er rim weight of just 425g. All are built with Sapim CX Rays. They’ll launch with standard freehub bodies, but an XD Driver option is in the works.
EPS molding yields a much cleaner internal construction for more consistent wall thicknesses, as opposed to the much more common bladder molding construction used by virtually every other wheel manufacturer. Alto uses this for all of their road rims, too.
