The moment I live for isn’t the build itself.
It’s the message that comes a week later. The rider who went out on their first ride with new wheels and came back with something they struggle to put into words.
Recently it was a rider who ordered a light carbon wheelset for his mountain bike. He said his bike felt responsive in a way it never had before. Before that, a gravel rider who’d invested in an affordable but high quality alloy build. He was blown away. He told me his bike felt planted. Solid. Like it was a different machine.
Neither of those riders changed their frame, their fork, their drivetrain, or their fit. They changed their wheels.
That’s what this article is about. After more than 1,000 hand-built wheels since 2015, here’s what I’ve learned, most of it the hard way.
Your wheels were never built for you
When a bike manufacturer specifies wheels for a complete build, they’re not thinking about you. They don’t know your weight, your riding style, your terrain, or how hard you push in a corner. They’re thinking about a price point, a margin, and how the bike looks hanging in a shop.
The result is a wheel that fits a budget, not a rider.
I’ve seen this play out in every possible way across a decade of builds. Spoke tension so uneven the wheel was already failing before the first rider had put 500km on it.
- Nipples seized onto spokes from the factory, making the wheel impossible to true when it needed it.
- Spoke lengths that were simply wrong: too long or too short, a sign the wheel was built by a machine following a formula rather than a builder reading the actual components.
- Plain-gauge spokes where double-butted spokes should have been used, leading to premature breakage under load.
The one that still bothers me: premium hubs and rims assembled with cheap spokes and nipples. Great components, held together by sub-standard hardware that caused the rims to crack.
The shop that built the wheels spent money where the buyer would notice: the hub logo, the rim graphics… and cut costs where they hoped nobody would look.
On a complete bike at almost any price point, the wheels typically represent 5-10% of the total build cost when you work out what the manufacturer actually paid for them. On a R100,000 bike, that’s R10,000 worth of wheels. Often less.
Those wheels carry your entire weight, absorb every impact, handle every braking force, and determine how the bike feels in every corner. And they were specified last, with what was left in the budget.
The brand on the hub shell or rims doesn’t change any of that.
Where riders spend money wrong during upgrades
The most common mistake I see isn’t buying cheap wheels. It’s spending money in the wrong places.
Riders will invest heavily in drivetrain upgrades – a new groupset, a lighter crankset, ceramic bearings – and ride on stock wheels for years. The drivetrain is visible, tactile, and well-marketed. Wheels are assumed to be fine because they came with the bike.
But the single highest-impact upgrade on any bike is the wheelset. Nothing else touches your riding experience as completely. Wheels affect your acceleration, your handling, your comfort, your rolling resistance, and your confidence in corners and through rough terrain simultaneously, on every single ride.
The second mistake is paying for brand names instead of build quality. A famous logo on a hub does not mean the wheel was built well. It means the marketing budget was large. I’ve seen riders spend a significant premium on big-brand components and end up with a worse outcome than a well-specified build using brands they’d never heard of.
The question I always ask is: what will this wheel actually do under load, over time, for this specific rider? The brand name doesn’t answer that. The component specification and the quality of the build do.
The hub engagement myth
High-engagement hubs have become a status symbol in mountain biking. More points of engagement sounds objectively better. Faster pickup, more control, more performance.
In practice, for most riders in most conditions, it makes almost no difference.
Here’s what the marketing doesn’t tell you: ultra-high engagement hubs achieve their fast pickup through very small drive ring teeth. Smaller teeth wear faster. The higher the engagement point count, the more quickly those teeth round off under hard pedalling loads. You pay a premium for a component that degrades faster than a hub with fewer, larger, more robust teeth.
High engagement matters in specific conditions: trials riding, where you need instant power transfer on a rock or a drop. Ultra-technical terrain where you’re making micro-adjustments constantly and a half-pedal stroke needs to connect immediately. For the vast majority of trail riders, gravel riders, and road cyclists, the real-world difference between 36-point and 144-point engagement is negligible. What you feel is largely expectation.
Spend that budget on rims instead. You’ll feel the difference immediately and permanently.
Rim weight is where it counts
This is the most counterintuitive thing 1,000 builds has confirmed for me, and it runs against what most riders assume.
Saving weight at the rim matters far more than saving weight at the hub.
The physics are straightforward once you think about it. A wheel rotating at speed resists changes in that rotation – it wants to keep spinning, and it wants to keep going in the direction it’s going. The further a given gram of mass sits from the centre of rotation, the more it contributes to that resistance. Rims sit at the outermost point of the wheel. Hubs sit at the centre.
This means 50g saved at the rim is felt immediately in acceleration, in handling response, in how the bike feels when you flick it into a corner. 50g saved at the hub is imperceptible in real-world riding. The rotating mass at the rim (and tyre) is what your legs fight every time you accelerate and what your hands feel every time you change direction.
A lighter rim with a mid-range hub will outperform a heavy rim with a premium hub on every metric a rider actually experiences. Most riders build their spec the wrong way around.
If you’re on a budget, choose your rims first. Use what’s left for hubs that are less fancy. Don’t worry. I’ll never sell you junk.
The name-brand trap
I’m the official South African distributor for Nextie carbon rims and hubs. I didn’t take that on because it was convenient. I took it on because after building with Nextie parts for 5 years alongside well-known western carbon brands, I stopped being able to justify recommending the more expensive and inferior options to most riders.
The quality of the layup, the consistency of the finish, their after-sales support and warranty process are impeccable. Nextie rims and hubs perform at a level that matches or exceeds brands charging significantly more. What those brands are selling, in large part, is heritage, marketing, and the comfort of a name you’ve seen online.
That’s not nothing. Brand trust is real. But when you’re building a wheelset that needs to perform for the next decade on South African trails and roads, what matters is what the rim actually does, not what the logo says.
I’ve built with both. I know which one I recommend when someone asks me to build the best wheel I can for their budget.
What your wheels actually need to do
Most riders think about wheels the way they think about any other component purchase: weight, looks, price. They pick a spec, compare numbers on a spreadsheet, and make a decision.
As a wheel builder, I think about wheels differently.
I’m thinking about what happens to that wheel when 95kg of rider stands up out of the saddle on a steep climb. What happens in a fast corner on loose gravel when the tyre loads up and the rim needs to stay laterally stiff. What happens after 10,000km of riding, when spokes have been through thousands of load cycles and the tension needs to still be where I set it.
I’m thinking about the terrain. A wheel built for long corrugated gravel roads needs different spec considerations from one being asked to handle technical rocky singletrack.
I’m thinking about whether the spoke count is right for the rider’s weight. Whether the lacing pattern suits their riding style. Whether the nipple material makes sense for where they live and how often they’ll service the wheel.
None of this shows up in a product listing. It shows up in how the wheel feels after a year or two of hard riding.
The gravel rider whose bike suddenly felt planted and solid wasn’t riding on heavier wheels. He was riding on wheels that were actually built for him. The carbon build that made a rider’s bike feel responsive for the first time wasn’t about the gram savings. It was about having the correct hub choice, rim stiffness and spoke tension that matched how he rides.
That’s the gap. Between a wheel that was built to a price point and a wheel that was built to a rider.
The real measure
After 1,000 builds, the spec sheet is not what I remember.
What I remember is the rider who comes back and can’t quite explain what changed, only that everything feels different. Better. Like the bike finally makes sense.
That’s what a custom hand-built wheel is supposed to do. Not impress anyone on paper.
It must perform for the specific person riding it, on the specific terrain they ride, for the next decade – and looking good doing it is a bonus.
If you’ve been riding on stock wheels and wondering why your bike doesn’t feel the way you think it should, it might not be your bike.
Ready to find out what the right wheelset would do for your riding? Start with a conversation.
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