Rolf Prima Rolls Out Road Disc Wheels in the Vigor Alpha & Elan Alpha

I believe “designed to fail” is the technical term for this spoking pattern.

Why would they put a brake track on a disc wheelset? just for the extra weight?

From my perspective, this is a rush-to-market product in an attempt to be first with lightweight disc wheels.

I’ll be excited when the rims become disc specific, lighter, and cooler looking. Paired spokes do work well, 5 seasons of NorCal road racing on Bontrager Race X Lites have made me a believer.

@ChrisC, @offcamber

Apologies for the flippant comment! I try not to be that guy on the internet, but don’t always live up to that.

The issue I have with this wheelset in particular is not the spoke pattern per se, but rather the way the spokes meet the hub flange. The spoke pairs act to place the hub flange under high tensile stress. Add in the load cycles exerted by pedalling (and in this case braking b/c disc brake) and that flange will weaken, then break. That’s the unfortunate nature of aluminium. Of course, if you do your engineering right, you expect the rim to wear out before the other failure modes of the wheel (generally spoke breakage due to fatigue) manifest themselves. So you can add in extra material at the hub flange to extend its life, but this is added weight… a link: http://felixwong.com/gallery/images/b/broken_bike_parts9c.jpg Not the same hub, but you get the idea.

I’m not really keen to get into an argument about the ideal bicycle wheel, but my deeply cynical attitude is that most spoke “innovations” are just excellent marketing techniques. Since fiddling with spoking patterns generally won’t interfere too much with the performance or strength of the wheel, just the longevity of the spokes, there’s a bit of wiggle room there for manufacturers.

Anyway, only my opinion. I come at these things from an engineering background with several years experience as a bike mechanic, hence durability (as opposed to outright strength), repairability and simplicity of design appeal to me. My personal experience with paired spoke wheels is one of replacing many, many spokes on Shimano and Bontrager wheelsets with such a design (don’t see so many Rolf wheels down in Australia). Horses for courses, but the day you catch me riding paired spokes is the day someone’s paying me to do it!

I am running a set of 2011 prima vigor RS wheels in Mass on an 09 SL2 Tarmac. I currently have about 5K miles with no problem. I am 6’2″ Cat 4 rider an I have had them trued once. I love these wheels. The hubs are awesome and spin up so quick. I am very hard on my bikes and typically run about 195 lbs. I think if you keep up on the maintenance of any wheelset they will last. We run into problems when we ride wheels that are not trued and tensioned. If let go too long that’s when you have failures on wheels. With all the rage of deep dish and carbon clinchers lately I will take my Rolfs any day.