Brevet Rims Back in Stock!
We’ve got rims again! Rims are essential components of our bikes – we can’t ride without them. They are among the parts that we try to keep in stock at all times. But these aren’t normal times… To give you an idea of what it takes these days to keep you supplied with essentials, here’s the timeline for this order:
- January 2021: Order placed. Usually, it takes 3-5 months to get the order delivered.
- November 2021: Last part of production complete in Taiwan.
- Late December 2021: First available shipping option. Shipping costs are astronomical, and we’re tempted to delay, but our customers need rims…
- Late February 2022: Finally the ship pulls into the port on the U.S. West Coast – one month behind schedule.
- Mid-March 2022: The rims are delivered to our Seattle warehouse – more than one year after the order was placed.
Meanwhile, some of our own bikes have worn their rims a little thin. With rim brakes, rims do wear out. In normal times, that’s no problem: Replacing a rim takes about 15 minutes – you just tape the new rim next to the old one and switch over the spokes – and the cost isn’t much higher than a disc brake rotor. But that means you need a new rim… So you can imagine how excited we are to receive this shipment.
We really like the Brevet rims. When 650B became popular again, decent tires were still available, and better ones didn’t take long to develop. But all efforts to make 650B rims were hampered by poor materials or poor design. Some rim models had a tendency to crack. Others didn’t support the tires well. We finally talked to Kirk Pacenti, back when he still was involved with his name-sake company, about how we envisioned the perfect 650B rim. We talked about tire fit. We share our ideas how to shape the rim profile to distribute stresses and avoid cracking. We discussed sidewall thickness, which determines how long the rims last. We sent some drawings based on rims we’d measured. (We really liked the old Mavic Mod. 4.) We even lobbied for a 28-hole rim, arguing that for a front wheel with wide tires, that was sufficient.
Pacenti did some more work, and the result is a rim that supports the tires perfectly, yet installing and removing tires by hand is easy, without the need for tire levers (at least with Rene Herse tires.) The rims are tubeless compatible, of course. In fact, these rims are so good that Pacenti made them in 700C as well, because there aren’t many good rim-brake rims in that size, either. Most of the classics are too narrow and have a shallow well, making it extremely difficult to install tires.
We were excited when these rims became available a few years ago, and we’ve been running them on our bikes ever since. We’re glad that we now can get them again, for new builds or as spares for our existing bikes.
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