Some cycle components need riding for quite a while before their true qualities emerge. Rolf Prima’s Aspin wheelset is one such. I’ve been riding the RCUK test pair on and off for most of the year and have invariably enjoyed a responsive ride without noting anything outstanding about their performance.
Pondering wheel choice for the autumn tour, I briefly considered fitting the Aspins but opted instead for a pair of handbuilts with Mavic Open Pro rims laced 28×2/32×3 front/rear with double-butted spokes onto Ultegra hubs. Wheels, then that are about as close to traditional light touring fare as one might find, they were chosen for that obvious attribute, ease of repair in the wilds. There are, after all, plenty of wheel-breaking hazards out in the sticks.
The Aspins’ spoke nipples sit inside the rim and need a T-bar for access and, given that breakage with such a low spoke count would throw the wheel way out of true with no immediate chance of repair, they simply aren’t my favoured option for such a ride.
However, when I rode the same wheels into London on my regular commute, I quickly found them a bit harsh and wooden even with 25c tyres fitted. Same with another pair of handbuilts of similar construction fitted to my Roberts PBP, so I fitted it with the Rolfs, shod with Continental Grand Prix 24c rubber.
Bingo! Well, great stuff, at any rate. The ride is very impressive, with a springy, resilient quality that belies the 22mm depth of the rims, while acceleration from standstill, a vital attribute at any of inner London’s traffic lights on the commute, is entirely free of lag or “wind-up”.
The latter is easily explained with reference to the rear wheel lacing pattern, which uses all 24 spokes tangentially. The non-drive spokes sit on a large-diameter flange while those on the drive side are laced to one more mid-sized. With 12 of them, all well-tensioned, pulling together, the wheel is torsionally stiff almost to a fault.
The behaviour of the wheels over bumpy surfaces is a little less obviously explicable but is likely to be the result of having the rear rim effectively secured at only 12 points and the front at 10, leaving long sections with no spoke insertion. A key feature of Rolf wheels is the pairing of spokes at the rim, which applies at almost the same place the axial pull from spokes on both sides, effectively eliminating the side-to-side “wave” that results from having alternating spoke insertions and allowing the use of a lighter, less rigid rim.
With less metal in the rim and less constraint on the way it can flex elsewhere as load is applied at the contact point with the road, the rim should have more freedom to deflect inwards at that point than with a regular spoke pattern, which is exactly how the Aspins feel to ride over bumps.
Time now to see how they stand up to a regular commute and more.
Rolf Prima Aspin wheelset £450
