I urgently needed a new rear wheel for my winter bike, and ended up buying an Alex Rims SX-44, the 29″ variant. This is clearly a budget disc brake wheel priced fairly low, but from the description it seemed like a no-nonsense wheel with decent components. My goal was to set this wheel up tubeless with Schwalbe Marathon studded winter tire (HS 396). Below are some facts and thoughts about this wheel.
There is a lot of dislike among cyclists for spoke protectors. They (the protectors) look ugly and many think that they are only necessary if you don’t know how to adjust your rear derailer properly. I know how to adjust the rear derailer, but on one of my bikes, for whatever reason, the chain jumped off the big sprocket and into the spokes. After replacing 6 spokes because of that incident, I have been firmly in the minority that favours spoke protectors. However, today I observed something that made me want to remove spoke protectors from all my bikes. Strangely, I have not encountered this argument against spoke protectors before, so I decided to type this up.
