I noticed at the last LTGP race, Alexy was running aero wheels on his mtb. How is he doing that? To my understanding, the wheel spacing would not work. Is there something I am missing, and could it work both ways? Could I get my mtb wheels on my gravel bike?
I believe he said on the Cooldown that they were special wheels. I guess having Enve has a sponsor means they’ll throw on whatever hubs you need.
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agree, he said in the cooldown they were special made for that race.
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So if its just hub spacing. I could theoretically switch the hubs and relace the wheels to work?
Wolf tooth offers the “boostenator” kit that has special end caps for specific hub makes so you can adapt a non-boost wheel to a boost frame.
In your case of wanting to go the other direction that might be more difficult and depends on your hubs. You can always make bigger through caps but it’s hard to make smaller if the hubs aren’t built for it. If you want aero MTB-ish wheels for your gravel bike take a look at those Zipp gravel wheels with the extremely large ID.
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MTB specific wheels would mean that the hubs that the wheels are built with have the right spacing for most MTB’s (boost or super boost). But rims are not category specific. Brands will market their rims towards a certain category, because MTB will need strong rims, road/gravel will be more aero or lightweight, etc, but there’s a lot of overlap and nothing with rim category is set in stone. There’s likely brands that use the exact same rim on their MTB and gravel wheelsets. In certain cases a gravel labeled rim will be strong enough for a MTB, and MTB rims are just fine for gravel, etc. As long as the hole count matches up, you can build a wheelset from any hub and rim.
On my gravel bike, I use rims from XMCarbonSpeed (https://www.xmcarbonspeed.com/Productinfo.asp?f=1650) which are 28mm inner width (if that’s what you’re going for). I could’ve laced them to boost hubs if I wanted. There’s also similar rims made by the more mainstream China carbon companies, BTLOS, Light Carbon, Nextie, etc.
For your question of “can I go the other way”, it’s going to even be more of a “yes” that you can use MTB rims on a gravel wheelset, because they will for sure be strong enough. 29er rims are the same bead diameter as 700c. A nice lightweight XC race rim would make for a good all-around or climbing gravel rim.
If you’re looking to make this happen, my question to you would be “what specs of rims (width, depth, and goal weight) do you want on your gravel bike?” Then we can help out with some options.
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