HTupolev

Salsa may have helped revitalize flared drops, but they've been the norm for most of the history of drop handlebars.

That explains a small amount of flare. When a bar goes beyond that into oodles of flare, they're thinking about the relative widths of the contact points, and/or they're aiming for a shallower wrist angle in the drops.

tFUnK

I'd only go the drop bar vintage MTB conversion route if the frame had some kind of sentimental value or retro clout. Problem is finding decent 26" wheels designed for rim brakes.

Vintage cyclocross or even hybrid bikes could be a good way to go, as they'll be based on 700c wheels already. The problem with CX bikes is that the older ones have a high BB which I don't like for gravel. The problem with hybrids is they don't always have great tire clearance.

A conversion can be fun but it's just easier to get an off the shelf bike already designed for gravel.

Herzlos

It's like converting any A into a B - it's usually a lot cheaper and better to just buy a good B in the first place. It can be a fun project, and gives you something unique, but unless you can source the parts for way below retail, then $ for $ you're as well going for an actual gravel bike.

Given you can buy a new gravel bike for under about $700 retail (like this one - I had the older model which was even cheaper and it did pretty well - https://www.halfords.com/cycling/bik...me-452950.html), I think it'd be challenging to build more suitable for less. Assuming of course you want it to do road and gravel.

Jeff Neese

There are plenty of choices in high-quality 26" rim-brake wheels, and that's true whether you want to buy just rims or complete wheelsets. Same with tires. No problem at all.

mstateglfr 

You could google and maybe pull up a handful, but lets not pretend like the inventory for high quality rim brake 26" wheelsets or rims is anything close to that for 700c disc or rim brake wheelsets or rims. Are 1650g 26" rim brake wheelsets even being built and sold?

...in my garage I have 3 26" MTBs at the moment so its not like I reject that tech or anything similar, but I dont see what you say exists.

tFUnK

Agree with you on tires, but if you have a good source on rims or wheelsets, please let me know. Can't find anything new and what rare finds I do come across in the used market can be unreasonably expensive.

When's the last year that the Cross Max was made in a 26" rim brake version?

HTupolev

Not sure I'd agree there. There are a number of choices that are *fine*, but they're neither superlight nor particularly aerodynamic. And truly new designs are very thin: there are only a couple options that are nominally tubeless-compatible.

Steve B.

Who would even worry about aerodynamic in this use ?

HTupolev

What do you mean? Why wouldn't aero be a useful aspect of a high end gravel wheel?

Steve B.

For the OP who is considering adapting a 26" wheeled mt. bike as a conversion, I get the idea that speed isn't a criteria. Might be wrong, but if you consider that aero factors come into play at speeds in the 20+ range, how often does somebody outside of racing, move that fast ?. Thus I'm not seeing the point of considering the aerodynamics of a wheel in a gravel/dirt environment. YMMV

HTupolev

Aero factors don't require any particular speed to come into play, and I go 20+ pedaling on my drop-bar conversion quite frequently, especially when it's on paved roads. When I go on mixed-surface rides, it's not like I have a car following me around for doing bike swaps.

Steve B.

Well, I recall there was some magic number of near 20 before aero bars became useful, seems thats old school. Current thinking as expressed by a Specialized engineer "Mio Suzuki, Senior R&D Engineer leading aerodynamics at Specialized, who explained the testing she’s done with riders of different levels. The magic number is surprisingly low — only 13mph.". I mean, who knew !. So I learned something today,

Jeff Neese

Perhaps we have a different definition of "high quality". I'm thinking Sun CR18, Alex DH19, DT Swiss DT26, Mavic XC series, and so on. There are lots and lots of choices. What exactly are you looking for that you can't find in a 26" wheel?

mstateglfr 

Yes to the bold.

Again, are 1650g 26" rim brake prebuilt wheelsets plentiful? That is what I would consider high quality.

A prebuilt 2250g wheelset with 32 plain gauge spokes laced to a Deore hub and Rhynolite rim is perfectly usable, but it isnt at all what I would call 'high quality'.
For the record, i have 2 wheelsets with the above specs so it's not like I refuse to use them. Well one has xt hubs and butted spokes, but its still a tank of a wheelset.

Jeff Neese

I thought we were talking about MTB wheels. Lighter is always better, but we don't necessarily look for superlight. Same thing with aerodynamics. Those are not the things people are looking for in a high quality MTB or gravel bike wheelset.

Jeff Neese

Being lighter is not a characteristic of quality. It's simply a design decision. You can have high quality wheels that are light, and high quality wheels that are heavier but stronger. You can also have cheap low-quality wheels that are light, and low quality wheels that are heavy. We're not talking about a carbon-fiber road bike. He's putting together a gravel bike. He may even want 36 hole wheels with double-wall rims, rolling on hubs that are maybe a little heavier but are known to be bomb-proof. And it can all be of exceedingly high quality, depending on how much he wants to spend. For this application, the best wheels will NOT be the lightest wheels.

mstateglfr 

I'm the post immediately preceeding this, you say that lighter is always better, but superlight isn't necessarily looked for.
Well super- that lines up exactly with my 1650g comment since that weight is not heavy nor super light. It's a very reasonable compromised middle.
As for your earlier claim that aero isn't looked for in gravel, well that's just wrong. It isn't looked for by everyone, but it is still a design feature that is valued.

I agree that wheels can be light but bad or heavy and good. You aren't saying anything new here.
Your claim, which was disagreed with by many almost right away, was there are plenty of choices in high quality 26" rim brake wheels. You have yet to at all show that though. To me, plenty would mean at least 2 dozen. I could list at least that many high quality 700c wheelsets in 5min.
Now we are defining what 'quality' means. We can also argue over what 'plenty' means, I guess.

I will continue to sit in reality and know that a 2250g wheelset is overly heavy for gravel riding and that sort of weight is not what most people look for in a replacement gravel wheelset, especially when it's a smaller 26" wheelset.

ETA- a 36h 26" wheelset is overbuilt for gravel riding. It just is. That's unnecessary. Hubs needn't be heavy to be bombproof.
And of course the rims would be double walled. We arent in 1983 still- double walled is so clearly an expectation that I didn't think it necessary to clarify.

HTupolev

Gravel, although depending on use case there's not always a need to differentiate.

I was using "superlight" a little frivolously. Relatively few rim-brake 26er wheelsets made today are very light at all. The minimalist Mavic Crossride UB is probably close to the lightest at ~1700g, and there are tons of premium mountain and gravel wheelsets that are both lighter and have much better impact resistance.

Aerodynamics often isn't, but it can be. A lot of gravel bikes spend a lot of time going fast pedaling, and wider tires mean more room for aerodynamic improvement. It took a while, but some wheel manufacturers have finally started to take the idea seriously, like with the SwissSide Gravon 420 or the Flo G650/G700 wheels.

Jeff Neese

Every wheel is a trade-off between strength, weight, and cost. You seem to be prioritizing weight (and aerodynamics), but for wheels under discussion here (MTB or gravel bike with rim brakes) weight may not be the primary design factor for a high quality set of wheels. The guys riding in the TDF certainly optimize their road bike wheels for weight and aerodynamics, but that's not the kind of bike he's building.

A Mercedes C-Class coupe weighs a LOT more than a Ford Focus. The Mercedes is certainly higher quality, even though it weighs more than the Focus.

Most of my mountain or gravel bikes have custom-built wheels, using CR18 rims, DB DT Swiss spokes, and Deore Hubs. I don't think you're going to find a higher quality wheelset. There were several other choices of premium-quality rims, but I like the CR18. And you can spend as much or as little as you want on hubs. Quality? Not an issue. Choices? Plenty.

DorkDisk

I've a lot of 26ers, many with very nice wheelsets and agree that CR18 and Deore is a mild bummer. Having seen and having nicer wheels, its hard to accept the lack of high end in 26" wheels.

A solution is a vintage steel hybrid. Steel can use cheap modern 130mm road wheelsets easily. Like MTBs, they are also cheap and abundant. Pick your price and ride off.

SkinGriz

I’m completely ignorant.
Mostly lurking and ride my low end bikes until I figure out what I want.
Is 32h double wall better than 36h single wall?

SkinGriz

What size wheels are those?
BTW nice bike.

HTupolev

We're not prioritizing anything in particular. We're saying that the wheels you're talking about aren't particularly high on the cost spectrum and end up having trade-off balances in strength, weight, (and/or aero) that don't place them into the tier range that most think of as "high quality."

Factors like weight and aerodynamics can matter for bikes that aren't road racing bikes, and that's even true for bikes that aren't overall strong in those areas.

For instance, if I wanted to do a maximally high-performance road build with my '79 Fuji frameset (because I like how it rides and pedals), the fact that its frameset is fairly heavy and has cylindrical tubes doesn't mean there'd be no benefits to a super-nice aero racing wheelset.

The wheels I built for my Stumpy are comparable: Deore XT T780 hubs, Sapim Laser spokes, Sun Rhyno Lite 36H 26er rims. It works fine, and I agree that it's difficult to find overall higher-quality sets for sale.

But that doesn't make it "high quality." Thin DB spokes are less aero and less nice to build with and tune than bladed spokes, and just generally have no advantages on them besides price (and sometimes aesthetics for classic bikes). And most Sun rims are frankly pretty poorly-made: I had to intentionally use slightly uneven tensions to true them sufficiently to work well with my high-leverage v-brakes. It's much different from using good-quality aluminum rims like HED's Belgium series, or nice carbon rims. (I don't say this as any particular knock against Sun, they're reasonable for the price.)

Of course, "high quality" is subjective and very relative. But I think you have a different reference point than most cycling enthusiasts.

DorkDisk

700c, with 40mm tires

mstateglfr 

More talk without substance. Yes, its well known and accepted that something heavy can be quality. Your car example is bad for many reasons but yes, I will yet again say that I recognize weight is not the singular qualifier for if a wheelset is quality or not.
Your 26" rims weigh the same as sturdy 700c aluminum rims(Archetype for example). Your wheelset weighs 2115g. It does what you want, so thats cool, but lets not pretend its necessary for the wheelset to be reliable or perform well.
A 700c handbuilt wheelset for gravel can have reliable rims, DB spokes, brass nipples, and be long term reliable even for my 215# body while weighing 1650g. And thats in 700c size. The extra weight of your smaller wheelset isnt needed for how I(or most people) ride gravel. Its just 500g of extra weight.
Just swapping out your hubs for quality and reliable Bitex hubs and 28 double butted spokes would provide a bombproof(26" remember) gravel wheelset that weighs under 1800g. If 26" rims existed that were actually proportionally lighter than their 700c relatives, then that wheelset would be right about 1700g,


...but 26" rims arent being made that are proportional in weight to 700c rims. No effort is going into designing better 26" rims, really. And that means that unlike your claim, there are not tons of options for high quality 26" rims. So far, you have just listed a wheelset that while very reliable, is unnecessarily heavy for what you say your needs are. That isnt really a great example. And even if it were, thats 1 example. Where are the quality wheelsets you mentioned earlier?