Ritchey WCS Trail 30 wheelset review
June 19th, 2015
By Andrew Dodd in Reviews
Product Full Name: Ritchey WCS Trail 30 27.5 wheels
Retail Price: £635
Available From: Paligap
Early Innovator
Ritchey have a long past in making XC biased frames and components, but the WCS Trail 30 wheel is very much a bang up to date trail-focussed wheel, using a fairly wide 30mm rim to offer tyre support for larger volume tyres – and a full tubeless rim bed design.
Tom Ritchey is one of mountain biking’s father figures, and was there at the very beginning of the MTB movement in California. The story is documented in amazing detail in the book Fat Tire Flyer – read our review here.
Throughout the nineties, Tom Ritchey made some of the very best hard tail frames around, including the legendary P-series bikes, like the P21 and P22 as raced by one of the most successful XC racers of all time – the great Swiss rider Thomas Frischknecht.
The iconic P21, as raced by the likes of Henrik ‘chair-knees’ Djernis and Thomas Frischknecht in the nineties…
Retailing at £635 a pair, the Ritchey WCS Trail 30 27.5 wheels aren’t the cheapest on the block, but they are a competitive 1650grams a pair (with XD driver installed) and have a very good build quality.
The rims measure just under 30mm wide, and have a 25mm internal width – wider than most conventional rims which means they can accept a wide tyre easily and offer good support too.
At 24mm high, they are fairly deep which also means you shorten the spoke length slightly, and they have an offset rim design, so the spokes can form a slightly better bracing angle to increase stiffness and strength.
The fairly wide 30mm rim gives the tyre a good base without affecting carcass shape, and supports the sidewalls well. We have given ours a lot of stick and have only suffered one sidewall crease, which we removed with an adjustable spanner.
The 28hole rims are also properly sealed like UST rims, which means no faffing around with rim tape and tubeless conversion kits. Just install the supplied tubeless valves, pop a tubeless compatible tyre on, use your preferred gloop and pump away.
We found that brand new tyres from Maxxis and Schwalbe popped up first time, but when swapping for some older used tyres, we needed to resort to using our Bontrager Flash Charger pump to get them up to avoid a bout of garage rage .
Once seated there were no issues however.
We’ve just installed a Schwalbe Procore kit to our sample Ritchey WCS Trail 30 wheels, and will be riding the indefinitely.
The rims are laced up with DT Swiss Competition spokes and nipples in a 3 cross pattern, to own brand cold forged Aluminium hubs with tall flanges and decent quality sealed cartridge bearings.
The Ritchey WCS Trail 30 27.5 wheels freehub design has a 6 pawl system, mounted in the hub rather than on the freehub body – and has an ultrafast 12 point pick up with virtually no lag.
The 6 pawl system has 12 points of contact – which offers rapid pick up and is very reassuring.
Unusually, Ritchey have chose to use the Shimano centre-lock disc brake mount – which works really well but is a bit of a pain as you need the specific Shimano disc rotors, or you’ll need to buy a 6-bolt adaptor separately. Bear that in mind if you buy a pair as you’ll need to factor in the extra cash for the rotors or adaptors.
Centre-lock disc mounting systems work great – but if you don’t already have compatible disc rotors you’ll need to buy some, or get some 6-bolt adaptors.
Up front, the hub accepts either 15 or 20mm axle options via removable adaptors, and the rear has options for 135 and 142mm in bolt through or quick release.
The combination of deep rim profile, shorter-than-usual spokes and a good wheel build made for a tough, snappy feel out on the trail. As expected, tyre support is good – certainly better than some other complete wheels that use narrower rims.
The rim itself seems to be very strong too – I’ve made it a bit of a mission to treat them pretty badly in rock gardens, and have only suffered a very minor crease – which straightened out fine with an adjustable spanner and didn’t affect the tyre seal.
I only burped the rear tyre a handful of times too, at some very low pressures. All in all – they perform really well and have a reassuringly sturdy feel.
At time of writing I’ve installed the Schwalbe ProCore system to the wheels, so I’ll be riding these wheels indefinitely so you’ll be able to read a bit more about the wheels soon in the review.
We say
A stiff, strong and predictable feeling whilst at a very competitive weight considering the alloy build. Though there isn’t an issue with the way the Shimano centre-lock system works – the practicality of factoring additional cost in needs to be considered.
The Ritchey WCS Trail 30 wheels use a well made and trust worthy hub design with an excellent pick up, and to date have performed perfectly. We like the fact they use easy to replace spokes, and we’re gladly continuing to run them. Recommended.
