Enve AM Rims

Let’s get it out there from the beginning; these rims are expensive—bloody expensive. Think of how much a range topping alloy wheelset will cost, around $1,000 perhaps? Well that’s about the price of a single Enve rim—one rim, no hubs, no spokes! You can also purchase them as complete wheels built with DT Swiss 240 hubs and Aerolite spokes for around $3,500. This sort of expense is roughly in line with top-end carbon road hoops, but then roadies don’t seem to bat an eyelid at spending upwards of $15,000 on a bike that lacks suspension and doesn’t even have disc brakes—oh well, at least it’s probably been built with Italian passion! I’m certainly used to looking at high-end gear but initially the thought of spending upwards of three grand on a pair of wheels made my MTB oriented sensibilities shake. Can it be justified and what’s the point of wheels that cost so much?

On the road, carbon rims are all about aerodynamics. Composite materials permit rim profiles that are deep and aerodynamic without paying a heavy weight penalty. With average speeds in the 30-50kp/h area, roadies know the importance of aerodynamics—it can make real difference to your speed. By comparison, the best riders World Cup XC will average around 20kp/h or less during an event, so aerodynamics are far less significant. Even if you wanted to optimise this aspect, it seems rather pointless to invest in sleek aero rims when you’re only going to wrap them in fat, wind beating knobby tyres!

At 350g per rim in the 26-inch XC version and 395g for the wider AM style, they are light but not in a different league to good alloy rims. However, once you look at the testing and development that Enve has put into their carbon rims you start to realise what they are all about. Carbon is typically seen as being light and fragile but Enve has used the World Cup downhill circuit for as their testing ground—it’s hard to think of a more brutal environment for carbon rims. In their first season on carbon rims, the Santa Cruz Syndicate team had to replace 53 wheels. Sounds pretty drastic but a year prior they destroyed 180 alloy wheels. After two years of development, the team wrecked just 11 wheels through the 2011 season and a single set of race wheels took Steve Peat through the entire year! It’s also worth mentioning that all of the failures were cracked bead hooks, not catastrophic race-run ending failures. While this all relates to their 475g downhill rims, it certainly bodes well for their toughness.

The more I heard about these wheels the more curious I became. I love the feel of really light wheels but the fast and sometimes rocky local trails always extract a toll on my lightweight tastes. Just about every wheelset that I’ve had in the 1,400-1,600g weight area has suffered with dented bead hooks and flat spots. While they usually survive for a year (and in some cases a bit longer), I’m often left bending the bead hooks straight with a shifting spanner. I guess I’ve got XC-oriented tastes but my riding is a little more on the all-mountain side of things.

Fat yet Light

So here I am going through a set of $1,000 cross-country wheels every year while the $3,500 Enve wheels promise to remain dent-free for many years. The break even point for me would come after three and a half years; anything beyond that and I’m ahead. That alone wouldn’t convince me of their worth, but there’s more to the Enve rims. Whilst their XC rims are on the narrow side (they measure just 18mm internally), the AM rims are really wide and still very light. As I discovered when playing around with fatbikes, wide rims offer real benefits.

Wide rims don’t mean you need to run massive tyres; it’s more about offering better support to the tyre. Fat rims allow you to run lower pressures without suffering from tyre squirm; this leads to better traction and comfort. Straighter sidewalls and a bigger air volume also mean less sidewall deflection under your bodyweight, and that lowers rolling resistance. Sure you can get wide alloy rims too, but going wide and light in aluminium means that you’ve got a thinner, more dent-prone extrusion. Enve AM rims promise the best of everything; low weight, wide profile and better impact resistance. All of this niggled away at me until I decided to take the plunge; I actually bought these rims to have as my own and I’ve now been on them for 10 months.

The initial build was an eye-opening experience. These rims took a lot of spoke tension without flinching. When loading the wheels in the build process to release any spoke wind-up, there was so little flex that it felt totally foreign to building a 1,500g alloy wheelset. The final truing stage was totally brain-dead—these things were straight and round from the outset and I could do no wrong when tensioning them. Once built with DT Revolution 2.0/1.5/2.0 butted spokes and Tune hubs, the end result was a 1,363g wheelset. I’ve never owned a lighter set of wheels yet these rims are rated for all-mountain use, come with a five-year warranty and offer a very substantial 24.5mm internal width. Externally they are massive at 30mm across—with their big white logos they are big, bold and quite an eyeful.

The rim finish is also worthy of note. I’ve looked at plenty of carbon rims and built a few in my time. Most have spoke holes that are drilled into the rim—this cuts through the carbon and it’s not uncommon to find loose fibres and delamination around the holes as a result. Enve uses smaller than normal spoke holes with internal nipples and the holes themselves are moulded in, not drilled. The result is both cleaner and stronger; another indication of the quality that you are paying for with the Enve product.

In use, the lateral stiffness of these wheels was readily apparent. They feel incredibly solid and flex-free. It’s as if you’ve got the steering precision of sturdy 1,800g plus all-mountain wheels with the nimble responsiveness of featherweight XC race wheels. Whilst it’s something I’ve heard mentioned plenty of times before, I can’t say that I felt any damping effect from the carbon rims—these puppies just feel solid.

What clearly pays dividends is the rim width. With my previous 19mm internal rims, I needed to run at least 28psi to stop the tyre squirming and burping air when cornering aggressively. Now I’m able to get away with as little as 20psi with the tyres still feeling solid and well supported—no squirm and no unseating of the tyre bead mid-corner. Running such low pressure has enhanced both comfort and traction, and that’s been far more noticeable than any supposed damping magic. They also roll along surprisingly well given the low pressures that I’m using.

Now I may have laid down my own cash for these rims, but I haven’t babied them as a result. I bought them to ride and ride hard. They lived the first five months on a 130mm trail bike and the last three months on a 150mm bike being ridden at speed through rocks, taking decent sized drops and coping anything that I could throw at them. With just 20psi to protect them, they’ve taken plenty of impacts that would have dinged the bead-hooks on an alloy rim.

Crunch Time

There’s one instance that really sticks in my mind; riding off a metre-plus drop to flat, I wound up being off-line and landed my front wheel straight onto a large protruding and pointed rock that was embedded in the ground. Six inches of fork travel was swallowed in an instant, the tyre bottomed too and it all came with a rather sickening everything bottoming out at once kind of ‘clack’. While it felt nasty, I didn’t feel the front wheel flinch and there was no structural damage. The wheel remained true, spoke tension even and the only sign that anything happened was a sandstone scuffmark in the carbon. My gut feeling is that this would have put a good-sized dent and flat spot in any alloy all-mountain rim.

Their strength and all-round toughness has left me thoroughly impressed, while the wide yet XC race-light design gives them a tremendous ride quality. However there are a still a few less than perfect points that are worth mentioning. They may have a UST compatible inner rim profile but they still require a wrap of tape to cover the spoke holes if you want to run them tubeless—they come supplied with a roll of gaffa tape for this purpose. It works well and they aired up easily with regular non-tubeless tyres but the tape wears out eventually. Another catch comes with the spoke nipples; they are hidden inside the rim so you need to remove the adhesive rim tape to access them. That said, in eight months of hard riding I haven’t had to lay a spoke key on these wheels—they remain as true as the day I built them. For the weight weenies, it’s also worth mentioning that the supplied gaffa tape isn’t the lightest. A full wrap on my 26-inch all-mountain wheels adds 48g to the wheelset weight, something like Stans or WTB yellow tape only adds 16g—I swapped when the original tape wore out.

As insane as the upfront price is, I don’t regret my purchase one little bit. These wheels are keepers and I’ll be swapping them from bike-to-bike as I go. You can’t justify their expense by just looking at their outright strength or their weight in isolation, but combine these features with the enhanced ride qualities that you gain from the wider profile and you’ll begin to see how the Enve AM rims are a very desirable item. Are they worth as much as a good dual suspension bike? For most the answer will be ‘no’ but if you are chasing the best you can get for your once in a lifetime dream build, a set of these wheels could be the hot ticket.

Monza Imports (03) 8327 8080 / www.enve.com