Alex Rims not only had one of the prettiest booths, they also had one of the widest varieties of rims for every application from road to mountain to enduro to downhill to cyclocross to gravel to fat bike. Even the new “plus” size category was well represented alongside a monster 36″ rim.
The complete wheels are sold under the A-Class brand and also had a smattering of new options, mainly for road, gravel and ‘cross. Roll on in for specs, pics and a complete overview…
The yellow column of wheels was their fat and plus sized collection, which housed a few new additions. Spec cards are shown left to right for rims shown top to bottom (Blizzerk Pro is the top rim, MD50 is the 4th one down). Click to enlarge.
The Enduro/DH rims include the Supra, Volar and MD lines.
The cross country rims are the SC Pro, Evo, SPRK and XD-Elite.
For ‘cross and gravel and disc brake road, there’s the CXD, Draw and ATD models, some of which get asymmetric shapes for better spoke triangulation.
Their new Klimb wheelset is sort of an experiment. It uses the same spoke mounting pattern on the rim as their Karve mountain bike wheels, except that the T-Bar “pins” are enclosed to make it more aerodynamic.
The bars run through the rim, and the spoke head sits in them.
While it does add a bit of weight, it makes for an unbroken rim bed. So you won’t need rim tape to make it tubeless, which brings system weight a bit closer to normal. The rim profile has a bead seat with ridge to make it tubeless ready out of the box.
The CXD4 was released last year, but now you can get it with either 6-bolt or Centerlock rotor hubs.
The ALX473 is basic new alloy road bike set with a slightly deep 30mm rim that’s reasonably wide.
“So you won’t need rim tape to make it tubeless”. You won’t need rim tape to use an inner tube, either. Why not write just “So you won’t need rim tape”?
1400g for the ALX473 road set seems optimistic unless the rim material is paper thin.
When will the MD50 rims be available? Does anyone know?
When will the the MD50 rims be available? Does anyone know?
Why no picture of the road rims rack?
Been very happy with the quality of the Alex made rims (Roval Traverse 29’er) on my Stumpjumper Marathon bike.
Decent width, seem strong and light at 453gm for an aluminium alloy 29’er rim.
Now that the OE hubs have finally died, I’m rebuilding the rims onto DT Swiss hubs. The rims have worked great in tubeless conversion with tape and Stan’s fluid using Specialized control tires.
great seeing these wheels and rims moving ahead in design and technology
I’d be more excited if this display was meant for retail customers instead of manufacturers. A large portion of these rims are probably only “available” in the sense that if a bike manufacturer calls up alex to make them a OEM rim on a bike, then they’ll actually make the damn things, not before.
I hope they are speccing stronger spokes, the A-Class wheels on Jamis road bikes from 2008-2009 seemed to snap spokes at the slightest provocation. In their defense, Jamis saw sense and stopped using the A-class wheels in 2010.
I’ve had good luck with Alex products. They probably the majority of the industry rims.