Greetings all - I am unsure if this is the category that I really want this review / breakdown to be in, but it seems to fit here better than in DIY Builds. This thread’s purpose is to properly contain the discussion related to these wheels, as well as provide a place for my full review (coming soon)
Recently, a thread popped up, created by John over at Stakboards @ReplyRetricted. He introduced some “new” airless wheels that I had personally not seen before. It came up that these looked very similar in design to some of the Boundmotor wheels or Flash airless wheels, but they had some differences. Regardless, I was interested and since he was offering, I requested a pair be sent to me for review.
Stakboards; I don’t know much about this company yet, nor do I recommend buying from them quite yet. However, people want links, so here’s the link: https://www.stakboard.com/
After talking for a little bit, he sent over 2x 50t pulleys and four of the new 125mm airless wheels. For reference, from the date he said he would send them to the date I actually received them was about 19 days. That’s not really too awful considering they came from China. They were packed well and there was only slight damage to one pulley.
First Impressions / Initial Thoughts:
Here’s the real thing you clicked on this thread for, pictures.
I’ll share some more pictures as we go here, but my first impressions of these are WOW. Personally, I love how they look. The spoke style looks really slick, the offset core position looks really awesome, and the tires (I guess we can call them that) look great as well. Say what you want, but my personal preference is that I think these are my favorite looking wheels. For reference, the TB110 wheels have almost the same width.
Pulleys:
Here’s our first problem child. At first glance, these look great. They appear to be aluminum, anodized black. They are quite heavy, and are assembled using twelve bolts. The six small bolts near the bearing are grade 10.9 metric bolts, and they go through the pulley and connect the adapter onto the pulley. The six larger bolts are all grade 12.9. These were torqued very tight and were a bit scary to pull off.
You might ask why I had to take apart the pulleys, why would I do that when they look so great? Well. Apparently the @ReplyRetricted pulleys come with 9.7mm ID bearings. No idea why (this is approx 3/8 equivalent) but I cannot use them on my 8mm BN hanger axles. I intended to take apart the pulleys and see if I could yank out the bearings and put in the right size ones. While the bearings are 9.7mm ID, the OD is the standard 22mm.
After taking all of the screws out of the pulley, I was able to separate the adapter from the pulley body, but even after taking out the other screws that presumably hold the flange / pulley teeth together, the other parts wouldn’t budge. Additionally, I tried pretty hard to pull out the bearings but I think the only possible way to get them out is with a press, which I do not have at this time. I would love to use these pulleys because I think the design is pretty good, but I can’t right now.
One other note on the pulleys, on the inner side with the bearing, there is no issue, but it appears there is no spacer of any sort between the two bearings. While this would cause a lot of concern normally, since the pulley is full metal, it’s not as worrying, but I would be slightly concerned about torquing down the wheel nuts too hard for fear of ruining the bearings.
On the side with the wheel, there is a sizable gap between the outer bearing and the place where the first wheel bearing would be. This is definitely concerning as well because as you torque down the wheel nut, it’s difficult to see where the stress would travel.
Another important thing to point out with the pulleys is that they only fit into certain wheels. In a set of wheels, the spoke direction varies, two go one direction, and two go the other direction. Due to this, the pulleys will only fit onto two of them. The fitment of the pulleys is pretty tight, but leaving the heat shrink tubing on the fingers wouldn’t be the worst idea because it would reduce any rattling.
The heatshrink does get quite messed up because of the tight fit, so you’d want to take it off before test fitting in the wheels and then plan on pushing it on the final time
Wheel Details / Concerns
I do quite like these wheels before riding them. However, I am slightly worried about how the rubber sleeve attaches to the actual wheel. It seems like I can peel back the rubber a little bit if I give it some force. I don’t know if that would even be noticeable while riding, but I suppose if you corner really hard it could be a bit odd. I can pull it back further with two fingers
One of the other things I noticed was that the little holes around the outside don’t actually go that deep. They only go about 13.7mm deep. I’m sure that is by design but you can’t tell from just pictures.
The other thing to note about these wheels is that they are quite weighty.
Each of the wheels comes in at ~1.5 lbs, then another just over half lb each for the pulleys.
Overall these wheels are pretty dope. I’m waiting on a reply from John to see if he can fix my pulley issue. In the meantime, anyone have ideas? Any comments? Any questions?
