Strong wheels for narrow clearance bike
 

I have an old Cervelo RS and it has pretty narrow wheel clearances...max tire 25mm and a Velocity Dyad rim at 24mm outer width will not fit. So to do some light touring/bikepacking I used some some Mavic Open Pros and Dura Ace 32 hole hubs. I've ridden this hard for 10 years including a Northern Tier US crossing, numerous 2 week tours and weekend centuries. I was just doing some winter maintenance and noticed that the rear wheel was not straight and traced the issue to a fractured rear hub drive side flange on one hole. So I now need a new rear wheel. Bottomline is are there any narrow strong rims I should consider apart from Open Pros?....I know narrow and strong don't really play well together, but I thought I'd ask. I'm also considering a 36 hole White Industries M15 for the hub as I've used them before and they seem bomb proof.
What are your thoughts?

More spokes = more strength
 

Yeah, I’d go with 36 spokes if I could

im a fan of open pros but I’m sure there are others you can get

H+Son Archetype is a very well established rim that is not tubeless and is set for rim brakes.
17.5mm internal, 23mm external, and 25mm deep. The seam is welded instead of pinned and it comes in 32 and 36h drillings, so the WI hub you mention could work

If you had the old Open Pro rims, those were 15mm internal. Not sure if a 17.5mm internal is narrow enough for you?

I'm asking because I looked around and today's rims tend to be wide, even for road bikes, and I thought I might have missed something.

Thanks, It's the external width that concerns me most, I think 23 would be a really tight fit as 24mm wide Velocity Dyads do not fit, 20 to 21mm is probably ok.

I think the trend for wider tires has led to wider rims to prevent “ballooning” of wide tires in narrow rims. Not sure the effect the rim width has on wheel strength although I suspect wider = stronger. I do know from Jobst Brandt’s book that more spokes means more wheel strength though.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...d52719f4f.jpeg
Here is the offending crack

I have never used Deep V rims, even on my road bike I ride wider tires than you. Just mentioning this rim as an option.
https://www.velocityusa.com/product/rims/deep-v-622

At the bottom of this page, Velocity has a graph, the rims are color coded. Yellow for the Deep V means medium strength. The Dyads are also yellow and I have them on my light touring bike, thus maybe medium is plenty strong.
https://www.velocityusa.com/tech/rims/

Deep V looks like it might be a winner. 19mm outside width and shown as stronger than Dyad. Thanks!

Looking at the list of bikes you have, the Cervelo is probably the worst one out of them all for touring. You have an old Circle A, some Rivendells and a steel DeRosa all of which would probably be better candidates for touring and such. I would still ride the the Cervelo if you enjoy it and put some wheels on it but tiny clearance like that I wouldn't want to use it as much more than road bike.

I agree that my other bikes are good for light touring...apart from maybe the DeRosa because of the geometry. I also have a Specialized Diverge that has big tire clearances and a comfortable position, but I still worry about the hydraulic disc brakes for touring as an on road fix isn't going to happen.

Anyway I have a light set up that today would probably be described as bikepacking, although I've always used a traditional Carradice saddle bag and an Ortlieb handlebar bag, and it has worked well on the Cervelo RS for a decade over thousands of mostly road miles. I know that I'm sort of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, but my approach has made it work. The bike and wheels have had regular maintenance, bottom brackets changed etc, and in the end the thing that failed was the Dura Ace hub flange. That's on me for choosing that hub as I've never broken a spoke and the Mavic Open Pro rim looks fine.

In the end I've decided on a new wheel set using 36 hole Mavic Open Pros as I know they fit and they have proved to be up to my needs and White Industries M15 hubs that I have on a couple of bikes and I know they are tough.

I mean the only time I might possibly worry about hydraulic disc brakes on tour is if I am touring in some very remote places in less developed countries. People have been using them for decades on mountain bikes with no real issues and like anything on a bike so long as it is set up properly and you keep up with any maintenance you might require you are fine. If people aren't constantly ripping out lines on MTB trails I think you will be more than fine on the road. In the many disc brake bikes I have sold very very few have had any real issues and usually that is either warranty stuff we find right away on a new bike or it is generally something uncommon or just normal maintenance like someone decided to not change their pads in forever and have been riding it a lot but that can happen with rim brakes or mechanical brakes of any sort that use pads.

White Industries does make excellent hubs, freewheels, cranks and other great stuff. They are a good choice for nearly everything.

My head is with you on the disc brakes, I'm just an old geezer who finds it hard to change.

Fair dinkum...but you will be OK I promise.

I have Deep Vs on my touring bike and they are fine rims. They are a bit heavy, however. The Velocity Fusion is similar to the Deep V but about 80 g lighter per rim. The A23 from Velocity is another rim to consider. It’s a bit wider than the Fusion and Deep V but lighter and it has an off-center option which helps make the rear wheel stronger.

But the strength of the rim doesn’t matter. It’s not what makes for a strong wheel. The rim is just a convenient place to put a tire. The rim gets all the glory but it doesn’t deserve it. The part that does all the heavy lifting when it comes to wheel strength and gets none of the credit is the spokes. For light touring…and even heavy touring…going to a triple butted spoke like a DT Swiss Alpine III spoke greatly increase wheel strength and durability far greater than any rim will. This article does a very good job of explaining why. You can get about the same strength and durability with 32 of the triple butted spokes as you can with 36 double butted spokes and likely about the same as 40 straight gauge spokes. Hjertberg claims more than that but I’m a bit more conservative.

Combine the triple butted spokes with an off-center rim like the A23 which decreases the tension differences between the drive and non-drive side spokes and you’d have a truly bombproof wheel.

And, yes, the White MI5 is a great hub.

If the rim and spokes are still good I'd just stick another hub in it.

Thanks, great information. I've ended up with White Industries M15, DT Swiss 2mm thick spokes on 36 hole Mavic Open Pros; the same rim and spokes I've ridden for the last decade across the US, up and down the Erie Canal, and all around New England, but I beefed up the hub.

The rim and the spokes look ok, but they have had a lot of use and maybe the reason the hub flange fractured as an issue with that spoke. Anyway after a decade I think I'll just use a new rim and spokes.

I would just get another set of Open Pros. The Deep Vs are very heavy. I had them on a fixed gear bike back in the San Francisco hipster era.

I was grateful for the Deep V suggestion and looked at Velocity, but after a bit more reading I decided to stick with what has worked for a decade. So I'm going to 36 hole Open Pros from 32 and replacing the Dura Ace hub with White Industries M15.

For touring the lacing of the wheel is what counts. I have used a 4 Cross lacing for my touring wheels. One ends up using longer spokes so I needed to carry my own spares although I never needed to use them.

I'm going with cross 3 on my 36 hole Open Pros.

I'm a big fan of Open Pro rims. Over 10 years ago, I built two sets of wheels both using Open Pro 32 hole rims, Ultegra hubs, and DT butted spokes laced up 3 cross and they are still serving me well today, that after a combined 35,000 miles. Each winter I like to tear the hubs apart for a good cleaning, repack the bearings and true them up. I've done plenty of light touring on them and had no issues though I leave the heavier touring to their bigger brother, the Mavic A 719.

Nun, I don't recall the max tire width your Cervelo can take, 25mm? I have a feeling we've discussed this in the past, but I forget.
The reason I bring it up is how I am convinced that wider tires at lower pressures really make life easier for both a wheelset and the rider with no speed penalty. Then also a tire that is more flexible will give a smoother ride and transmit less forces into a wheelset than a stiffer tire of the same width.
When I put a 32mm Supreme on the bike I showed the photo of above, after riding it forever with 28mm Gatorskins, the comfort difference was noticeable, especially over rough surfaces and being attentive to not overdoing the pressure.

Overtensioned spokes are always going to be an issue and possible problems for rims or flanges, but that's another factor. The only time I've had any problems with a rim was actually when I did Montreal to Boston ages ago, and the spokes on my rear wheel had probably been slightly overtightened, along with higher pressures on the 28s than needed, and I ended up with tiny cracks around the spoke holes on the driveside.

At the opposite end of things, my heavy touring bikes 32h mtb rims (pretty narrow old school rims) have behaved really well when the bike has been pretty darn loaded front and back for some of my longer trips in far off countries, and I am sure the flexible 2inch and 1.6in tires at proper pressures have played a big part in making life easier for the wheelset.

Pretty much my experience. I was cleaning my bike and looked at the back wheel and it was way out of true. I thought it might be a broken spoke, but on inspection it was the Dura Ace hub flange that had cracked. The White Industries M15 will hopefully be a bit more robust.