Originally Posted by
cyclezen
Well, just 2 mos ago I put in new Velox rims strips - 22mm - doing a tire change, frt & bk, and the tape fit perfectly in the bed only... the 2 ardennes wheelsets are same... and remembering the Orders and Invoices from HED...
My older Ritchey OCR aero wheels are 17 - like them a bunch, so I still ride those on my Marin Treviso...
Ride On
Yuri
My memory is not great— and really bad in some ways!— so I hit the Wayback Machine web archive site and dialed up Hedcycling.com from ‘09….
https://web.archive.org/web/20090822...astogne_c2.asp
You’re right that Bastogne C2 and Ardennes C2 are the same width, but probably you’re recalling the overall width (i.e. external width), which is indicated as 23mm. Internal width is not stated by Hed, but it certainly cannot be 21mm, which would mean the sidewalls— hooks n’ all— were 1mm. That’d be virtually impossible.
They could be 18mm internal, which would be an external-to-internal width ratio more in keeping with alu rim standards. However, as I mentioned earlier, Ardennes+ got 20-point-something millimeter internal width out of an external width extrusion 25mm wide, so it suggests the C2 rims could have been 17mm internal.
That said, the same year Hed dropped Ardennes+, American Classic launched the (nominally) 22mm external x 19.4mm internal Argent, so the tech for extremely thin sidewalls was there, but comparing the Argent and Bastogne rim specs in other dimensions, notably weight and depth, suggests that because the Hed rims are both shallower and heavier, that they were not at the same engineering level as the AC rim. AC couldn’t even afford the material to weld or machine the sidewalls, two features we see (I think) in Bastogne C2/Ardennes C2.
In any case, Hed’s status as a pioneer of wide rims is indisputable, as is their pioneering work in aero.