# Velocity Quill anyone?



## Mike T. (Feb 3, 2004)

A few weeks ago there was a big thread on the new Velocity Quill rim but it didn't look like anyone had really obtained them and used them
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Velocity Quill rim

Has anyone built up a set and put some miles on them? Opinions?

I see that BHS is now selling them.


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## rruff (Feb 28, 2006)

Be the first! I haven't seen one yet. Specs are interesting though.


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## Mike T. (Feb 3, 2004)

rruff said:


> Be the first! I haven't seen one yet. Specs are interesting though.


Take one for the team? Maybe I'll rattle Brandon's cage and see if he will chime in with any knowledge he might have.


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## bikerector (Oct 31, 2012)

I have about 5-600 miles on a pro build set built by the wheel department at velocity so I did not build them myself so I can't input on how builder friendly they are.

So far they have been nice. Here was my first impressions of them after the short ride time with them. 

Velocity Quill Pro Wheels, First Impressions - Cycling and Suffering

Short summary, better than the A23 in every way that I can think of. 

I like them a lot more than the archetypes I tried and slightly better than boyd altamonts I had this season while waiting for the quills to be developed. I haven't had them long enough to make any claims about durability. I haven't used pacenti or HED rims that it's attempting to directly compete against.

Yes, I made a comparison to zipp 202's because "they're the best" in a similar depth and I think these are a value alternative when considering something like that like the boyd altamonts or any other semi-aero aluminum rim.


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## rruff (Feb 28, 2006)

Thanks for the info. What is the finish like on these? I assume they have a sleeved joint rather than welded? Good braking?


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## bikerector (Oct 31, 2012)

rruff said:


> Thanks for the info. What is the finish like on these? I assume they have a sleeved joint rather than welded? Good braking?


The finish is a basic black paint with a hard to see "quill" decal on it. I tried to capture that on the image in my blog review but a mostly black decal on a black rim doesn't stand out much. People that hate loud decals will probably like it.

All velocity rims use a bonded sleeve thing, user "seely" has covered this in several other posts and I thought it came up on the previous thread about the quill though it might have been one about the aileron which is roughly a sturdier disc version of the quill.

Braking is currently a little crummy but I think that's more due to my brake pads than the rim. I'm running some clark mixed compound things because they were cheap and I wanted to try them and they are sup-par. I plan to go back to kool-stop or swiss-stop very soon with my next parts order.


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## bikerector (Oct 31, 2012)

From velocity's website

"Joining techniques
We use a unique sleeve joining process to create our rims. This process uses a joiner extrusion that fits perfectly inside the internal cavity of the rim, which is chemically welded in place once the rim is aligned to be perfectly round and flat. This joining process creates a very reliable rim while maintaining the strength properties of the aluminum at the join, unlike arc or resistance weld joining techniques which can lead to weak or brittle join sections."


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## rruff (Feb 28, 2006)

bikerector said:


> The finish is a basic black paint with a hard to see "quill" decal on it.


Surely it's anodized? I was hoping this rim would have better QC and finish than typical for Velocity rims. Not that they've been bad, but not top of the heap either. 

What are you experiencing while braking?


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## bikerector (Oct 31, 2012)

rruff said:


> Surely it's anodized? I was hoping this rim would have better QC and finish than typical for Velocity rims. Not that they've been bad, but not top of the heap either.
> 
> What are you experiencing while braking?


The black surely feels rougher like paint instead of anodized smooth. I don't think velocity anodizes anything. It's either paint or polished from what I've seen and used. I do like the look of their polished rims, have a set of atlas rims with a polish finish.

The braking sensation I'm experiencing is like the brake pads are hard instead of grabby like softer rubber compound. Stopping distance seems pretty long for a road caliper brake. Braking wasn't stellar with these pads with my boyd rear and open pro front either (my temporary set while in limbo for the quills). I just ordered some new swisstops so I should have a more reasonable update.


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## seely (Feb 13, 2007)

bikerector said:


> The black surely feels rougher like paint instead of anodized smooth. I don't think velocity anodizes anything. It's either paint or polished from what I've seen and used.


Just to clarify here, our rims are all anodized, except for White. Right now we're doing Black, Red, Blue and Silver anodized. We started doing the anodizing in-house last year, so there has been a little bit of a learning curve, particularly early on.


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## Jay Strongbow (May 8, 2010)

seely said:


> We started doing the anodizing *in-house last year*, so there has been a little bit of a *learning curve*, particularly early on.


That sounds familiar. It might be time to reexamine the point on the learning curve at which you deem a product worthy of being sold.


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## seely (Feb 13, 2007)

Jay Strongbow said:


> That sounds familiar. It might be time to reexamine the point on the learning curve at which you deem a product worthy of being sold.


We're stringent about the quality of the product that goes out into the marketplace, and with the ano process that unfortunately for us meant scrapping a lot of great rims for minor imperfections. 

That said, the only way to inspect ano for flaws is visually, and it is possible that of the 1,000's of rims that are out there, a few weren't 100% flawless. If that is the case, we are always happy to evaluate the rim and replace it if we can trace it to a manufacturing issue on our end. 

Most of the issues we did see with the ano process related more to variations in color among batches of rims, however, and not the overall quality of the ano. 

Our new Red is awesome btw: https://instagram.com/p/9wM9aLBDyB/?taken-by=velocityusa


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## Mike T. (Feb 3, 2004)

Seely, I see you're using a sleeved joint on this rim. Are there any issues with joint irregularity with this method? I'm sure most of us that have been into bikes for long enough have been bitten by the "tick-tick-tick" of uneven rim joints when braking.

I was quite common a few decades back but it's still not unknown even now as I had two rims last year that had unequal joints. I even put a pic-essay of a fix on my wheelbuilding web page. But we shouldn't have to go to those extremes.

You must have made a conscious decision to go the sleeved route and not the welded one and on such an expensive rim we can only hope that you chose the route after much consideration.

I read somewhere (maybe in this thread) that you have a sealer between the sleeve and the rim extrusion (to prevent sleeve rattles I assume). I assembled some Kinlin XC279 last week and I could see that they too had a sealer but another well-known vendor of sleeved rims doesn't and they have had some rim rattles - I have one. It's not bad enough that I need to dribble Loc-Tite down there yet.


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## seely (Feb 13, 2007)

Mike T. said:


> Seely, I see you're using a sleeved joint on this rim. Are there any issues with joint irregularity with this method? I'm sure most of us that have been into bikes for long enough have been bitten by the "tick-tick-tick" of uneven rim joints when braking.
> 
> I was quite common a few decades back but it's still not unknown even now as I had two rims last year that had unequal joints. I even put a pic-essay of a fix on my wheelbuilding web page. But we shouldn't have to go to those extremes.
> 
> ...


Good questions here, I'll try to answer as best I can. I've only been with the company the past 3 years or so, and the sleeve design, as far as I know, extends back to the early days of the company, so I can't really say what exactly led to the design.

I have seen some really, really nice welded rims, and some that are just terrible, even from the same manufacturer. Some look like they got left under the welder a little too long or with too much heat (forgive me -- I'm not a welder so I'm merely guessing), and badly deformed at the join. In most cases, the machining seems to take care of the brake track, but in some non-machined rims it's been an issue in builds I've done. I've also observed some pretty good deformations in the metal above the machined brake track, which is what leads me to believe the machining of the brake track may be a bit of a "fix" for a less than perfect weld. 

As far as strength is concerned, the sleeve join is plenty strong. Once sufficient spoke tension is on the wheel, the joiner itself doesn't play a huge role in the strength of the wheel. In fact, awhile back I saw a wheel that was built from something like 8 sections of rim with no joiners at all, and was structurally solid based on spoke tension alone. I can't say for certain that our sleeve join is as strong/stronger/weaker than a good welded join, but it hasn't ever been a point of recurring failures for us. 

As for the joiner coming loose, at some point its conceivable its happened, but since I have been here it has not. The "chemical weld" is super solid, and in many of our rims there is at least one spoke hole through the join, so a nip or two holding it in place helps too. 

Most other sleeve join rims use a punch in the web of the rim to hold the sleeve, from what I've seen. You'll see one punch divot on either side of the join. I have heard of those rattling loose, but I haven't with our bonded sleeve. 

Now, for variations at the join, it shouldn't ever been enough to affect braking. We use a surface plate to double check the rim's flatness, and pay especially close attention at the join since that's usually the hardest place to compensate for variations. If we sent out a couple that were bad enough to cause concern, that's on us and we would definitely like the opportunity to evaluate the rims for replacement.


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## Mike T. (Feb 3, 2004)

seely said:


> As far as strength is concerned, the sleeve join is plenty strong. Once sufficient spoke tension is on the wheel, the joiner itself doesn't play a huge role in the strength of the wheel. In fact, awhile back I saw a wheel that was built from something like 8 sections of rim with no joiners at all, and was structurally solid based on spoke tension alone. I can't say for certain that our sleeve join is as strong/stronger/weaker than a good welded join, but it hasn't ever been a point of recurring failures for us.


I'm sure lots of us have seen that video and while I now forget who did the rim/vid, I think they rode the wheel to prove that spoke tension alone is enough to hold any rim joint together.



> As for the joiner coming loose, at some point its conceivable its happened, but since I have been here it has not. The "chemical weld" is super solid, and in many of our rims there is at least one spoke hole through the join, so a nip or two holding it in place helps too.


I think it's more of an initial bad joint-alignment issue that a joint moving after the fact. More of a QC issue.



> Most other sleeve join rims use a punch in the web of the rim to hold the sleeve, from what I've seen. You'll see one punch divot on either side of the join. I have heard of those rattling loose, but I haven't with our bonded sleeve.


A simple staking of the sleeve doesn't seem to be a good idea to me. Surely it wouldn't add much to the rim production cost to coat the sleeve with a sealer goop during assembly.



> Now, for variations at the join, it shouldn't ever been enough to affect braking. We use a surface plate to double check the rim's flatness, and pay especially close attention at the join since that's usually the hardest place to compensate for variations. If we sent out a couple that were bad enough to cause concern, that's on us and we would definitely like the opportunity to evaluate the rims for replacement.


The ones I've had are easily felt with the fingers and the brake pad, when applied, confirms the problem. My little grind stone fixed 'em though.

Thanks for your answers seely.


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## deviousalex (Aug 18, 2010)

With an internal width of 21+ can 23mm tires work on these rims? On my current ride a Michelin Lithion 2 on a BHS C22w rim hits 26mm. I can't run "25mm" tires on this frame.


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## November Dave (Dec 7, 2011)

Great question. We're excited to try these out, which we'll hopefully get to do in time, but I do wonder what people who prefer (as I do) or are bike-limited to (as you are) tires in the ~ actually 25mm inflated range are going to be left with for options if this trend holds. 

Incidentally, I got pretty much yelled at yesterday because we don't yet (and might not ever) do standard Nimbus builds with Quills. That was interesting.


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## deviousalex (Aug 18, 2010)

November Dave said:


> Incidentally, I got pretty much yelled at yesterday because we don't yet (and might not ever) do standard Nimbus builds with Quills. That was interesting.


Is there a reason for that? Or is it because you guys haven't tried it yet and want to only build products you can back up with your own experience?


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## November Dave (Dec 7, 2011)

We had a really bad run of A23s a couple of years ago, when Velocity moved production to the US. They handled it fairly well, but it was still cost us a ton of time and headache. The good part was you noticed it before the build was done and shipped, the bad part was that you noticed it just before that point - so lots of time sunk into it. It's also no secret that Velocity has a history of incompletely or sloppily drilled spoke holes that need more than the cursory deburring that all alloy wheels get as a matter of process. This is not at all to slag on Velocity, I hope they have improved on this stuff, but the bad taste is not 100% gone from my mouth. That's background.

The rims themselves were launched at Interbike not yet two months ago. We could buy them from Velocity as we have an account with them, but for a couple of rims I'd just prefer to get them from a distributor for the same price and get free shipping and just have one transaction with another order. But the distributor I'd use for that doesn't even have them in stock yet. 

We're still hanging on to the tail end of our busy season, and builds out the door with products we know and trust are the priority, as they must be. Just doing that job week in/week out is roughly 60 hours/week. Add to that the work we do in product maintenance and development of our own stuff, customer service, being at races and events, and no one reading this would exchange work weeks with me. I love it, but I'm an unusual person in a unique situation, and my business partner is exceptional. 

We're working with four new third party rim products that are somewhere along the path of coming to market, each of which addresses something that we think very much needs addressing in the alloy rim environment. This takes a few hours a week, and we provide every element of the work we do there - we buy the rims and supply the spokes and hubs and labor to assemble. May not seem like it offhand, but that winds up being a big cost in time and expense - the hubs we use cost a lot of money, and nothing else is exactly free. When you are time-constrained as much as we are, every minute has an opportunity cost. 

We're not selling anything before we have a pretty darn good idea of how it behaves. The DTR460 was about as quick as we'd pull the trigger in taking a new product onboard in scale, and we were fortunate that a local friend was about to head off to a very intense week of crit racing just when that came up, and we were able to put a few lifetimes worth of abuse on them in that week. Apart from that, getting stuff tested isn't simple. Bench tests are straightforward, but the real world use part you can't easily outsource. 

As far as product portfolio goes, our pricing story is one of efficiency. We have a certain amount of working capital, and buying a greater width of stuff means that we can manage depth as well as we've learned to. It's also just plain a pain in the butt and an opportunity to screw up every time you add something new, so when you do add something new, you'd better be darn sure that it's going to add something back. 

Put all of that in the salad bowl with our sort of strategic uncertainty that the world wants or needs another very lightweight, mid-to-high-20s-mm-depth rim brake rim that's continuing the width trend past where we see more being better (rim brake and disc brake rims diverge to a significant degree here), and it's just not something that we're willing to re-prioritize around. It's on the radar, it's just not super hot for us right now.

Lunch break has now officially run way too long, but it was an interesting question so thanks. Back to building.


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## Drew Eckhardt (Nov 11, 2009)

Mike T. said:


> Seely, I see you're using a sleeved joint on this rim. Are there any issues with joint irregularity with this method?


Yes. At least one of my 3 Velocity Fusions is slightly mis-aligned, takes a left/right tension imbalance at the joint to run straight, and needed the brake track cleaned up.



> I'm sure most of us that have been into bikes for long enough have been bitten by the "tick-tick-tick" of uneven rim joints when braking.


I took care of that with a wet stone so it's even and silent now.


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## deviousalex (Aug 18, 2010)

November Dave said:


> We had a really bad run of A23s a couple of years ago, when Velocity moved production to the US.


I know I'm probably going to get a lot of hater-aid for this statement but....a friend of mine works in manufacturing for a major consumer electronics company that does nearly all their manufacturing in China. This is a company with the strictest quality standards. He showed me a product that didn't pass and it worked perfectly and I couldn't tell the difference at all. He told me they tested the accuracy of workers both in China and the US hand placing a sensor onto a board. The Chinese workers beat the US ones in both speed and accuracy.


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## dgaddis1 (Sep 27, 2008)

deviousalex said:


> I know I'm probably going to get a lot of hater-aid for this statement but....a friend of mine works in manufacturing for a major consumer electronics company that does nearly all their manufacturing in China. This is a company with the strictest quality standards. He showed me a product that didn't pass and it worked perfectly and I couldn't tell the difference at all. He told me they tested the accuracy of workers both in China and the US hand placing a sensor onto a board. The Chinese workers beat the US ones in both speed and accuracy.


There's really, really great stuff being made all over the world these days.


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## Jay Strongbow (May 8, 2010)

deviousalex said:


> I know I'm probably going to get a lot of hater-aid for this statement but....a friend of mine works in manufacturing for a major consumer electronics company that does nearly all their manufacturing in China. This is a company with the strictest quality standards. He showed me a product that didn't pass and it worked perfectly and I couldn't tell the difference at all. He told me they tested the accuracy of workers both in China and the US hand placing a sensor onto a board. The Chinese workers beat the US ones in both speed and accuracy.


Some factories are good and some suck. I'm not sure what hater-aid is but if it means giving someone flack for making a determination on an entire country based on one out of billions of examples I'd like to give you a dose of hater-aid.

My aunt's sister in law bought a lamp that was made in China and it broke. Mine was made in Sweden and it didn't. Thus Sweden is superior to China. I made that up but hopefully it illustrates how useless your post is.


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## dgaddis1 (Sep 27, 2008)

Jay Strongbow said:


> Some factories are good and some suck. I'm not sure what hater-aid is but if it means giving someone flack for making a determination on an entire country based on one out of billions of examples I'd like to give you a dose of hater-aid.
> 
> My aunt's sister in law bought a lamp that was made in China and it broke. Mine was made in Sweden and it didn't. Thus Sweden is superior to China. I made that up but hopefully it illustrates how useless your post is.


I think his intent was:

Many people assume Made in China = piece of crap

But in many cases, that is very, very not true.


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## Jay Strongbow (May 8, 2010)

dgaddis1 said:


> I think his intent was:
> 
> Many people assume Made in China = piece of crap
> 
> But in many cases, that is very, very not true.


Wouldn't be the first time I misinterpreted something.

I definitely agree with that. Lots of good stuff comes from China. Bike related and otherwise. Just like some crap is made is Italy and France despite some people assuming anything made there is the cat's meow.


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## deviousalex (Aug 18, 2010)

Jay Strongbow said:


> Wouldn't be the first time I misinterpreted something.
> 
> I definitely agree with that. Lots of good stuff comes from China. Bike related and otherwise. Just like some crap is made is Italy and France despite some people assuming anything made there is the cat's meow.


To clarify, my point is people assume US manufacturing is always better than China when that is not always the case. Especially in areas like putting together electronics where China has now been doing it on a mass scale for years now.


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## Jay Strongbow (May 8, 2010)

deviousalex said:


> To clarify, my point is people assume US manufacturing is always better than China when that is not always the case. Especially in areas like putting together electronics where China has now been doing it on a mass scale for years now.


Got it.

I worked in a US factory in the past. I definitely understand they are not necessarily all full of 'craftsmen' and 'artisans' as some people like to believe.


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## RoadCube (Nov 22, 2006)

Velocity Race hubs/ Fusion rims still true after 2 years. 
Thanks for a quality product Seely!
R.C.


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## rruff (Feb 28, 2006)

November Dave said:


> The good part was you noticed it before the build was done and shipped, the bad part was that you noticed it just before that point - so lots of time sunk into it.


Very common with rims, unfortunately. 

Building with rims that have poor QC can be very costly.


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## seely (Feb 13, 2007)

RoadCube said:


> Velocity Race hubs/ Fusion rims still true after 2 years.
> Thanks for a quality product Seely!
> R.C.


Our pleasure! The Fusion was always my go-to long before I even worked here.


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