TLDR: These wheels are very good. Selling other wheels.Disclaimer: I purchased these items with my own funds. I do not have a YouTube channel, I do not offer promo codes, and I do not sell wheels as a business. I do sell the computer mount and aero extension used for the aerosensor
Introduction:Hi all, I figure this topic probably needs its own thread since I never shared on this forum my thoughts on these wheels, and I now have a lot of thoughts to share based on some aero testing as well as maintenance at ~4200 miles or ~7000km.
In late November / December of 2024, I took delivery of a set of wheels I purchased from DFS. My post on WeightWeenies regarding this topic was likely the first review on that forum for the brand, but I think this forum might be more suitable for this content. The motivation for purchase was mostly curiosity about the THR Industries hubs. The build is a bit old-school, as I opted for steel spokes instead of carbon and a then-lightweight hub design. The lighter-weight t1000 rims were also not yet available, so I went with the heavier t800 superlight option--which, in retrospect, I probably don't regret, given how much abuse I have thrown at these wheels.
I think the wheels were $825 + shipping + tariffs.
Build Specs:- 50mm deep front, selected for compatibility with the 29mm Conti Aero 111 tire. Measured by me, this rim is 24mm IW, 31mm at the hooks, and 34mm at the widest point. The front wheel weighs 565g, the Rim should be ~400g.
- 60mm deep rear, selected for compatibility with GP5000 S TR 28mm rear tire. Measured by me, this rim is 23.5mm IW, 30mm at the hooks, and ~31mm at the widest point. The rear wheel weighs 701g; the rim should weigh ~440g.
- Weight, untaped, no valves = 1266g
- Weight taped + Tyrewiz + tires installed + Galfer road wave rotors (160mm front, 140mm rear) + Ti rotor bolts = 2000g
- Sapim CXray Super spokes, internal 3.2mm square nipples
- THR Industries R3 Hubs: 6 bolt, 21H front, 24H rear, XDR freehub
I had three goals in mind when selecting components.
Goal 1: Weight—Lose 500g off my old setupTLDR: Yup.
There are several ways to obtain this now, so nothing remarkable here. We have some more weight in the rims and spokes and less in the hubs vs. most carbon spoke options
This was a clear and immediate win.
Goal 2: Reliability—Be just as good as the DT Hubs I've owned.TLDR: Not quite, but close enough.
I don’t know much about how reliable THR hubs are considered in the Chinese market, but so far, there have been no issues. The Ti-N coating on the ratchets exhibits a slight discoloration, but the edges remain sharp. Nothing noteworthy there.
I was very worried about the floating ratchet wearing the hub shell where they interface. This is a mode of failure often seen on cheaper or lightweight ratchet hubs where, instead of using a steel thread-in item, the splines are machined into the hub shell. There is no evidence of this kind of wear at all. The first picture is of the wheels when they were new. Second is current.
The build itself has been slightly less reliable, with a very hard pothole hit at speed knocking the wheel out of true. The caveat here is that I am a light rider; however, I hit a deep pothole at ~30 mph after we were cut off by a car that didn't look before pulling out from a parking lot, and it was hard enough for my bars to rotate down a little. The bike has done some light gravel with these wheels, too, and it's been fine. Steel spokes were chosen in part because they are easier for me to obtain, and I felt that the weight gain was worth the potential aero benefits.
Overall, I am very happy, and to be honest, this is good enough for me not to worry about obvious design issues. However, my DT 240-based wheels have tens of thousands of miles each with minimal maintenance done twice a year. Most have also never required a true.
Goal 3: Aero—Be comparable to my benchmark wheelsTLDR: I think they are, but only when using the Aero 111 tire.
I've been around the block when it comes to using the Virtual Elevation protocol to estimate RR and Aero. In the past, I tested my current wheels from Ascent Bike, the Polaris 69mm, against the Enve 4.5 SES. Largely due to an aversion to hookless rims and because usable data from the VE protocol tends to be biased towards low yaw rates unless you have a way to measure wind speed, I ended up keeping the Polaris wheels, despite there being no conclusive evidence regarding which wheelset was faster. I had previously seen a surprisingly large difference between the Enve 4.5 wheels and Light Bicycle WR50s.
I know that trying to use basic principles when predicting fluid problems is usually a bad idea, and furthermore, wheel aero is a pretty complicated problem. However, this whole wheelset was an experiment, so I selected rims not based on weight, but for the front wheel to have an almost toroidal profile reminiscent of the old HED patent or the Cannondale Knot wheels. I also leaned heavily on some of the principles suggested by Hunt in their Sub50 whitepaper for their rejected profiles, focusing on selecting a profile with the largest nose radius in an attempt to squeeze every last bit of low yaw performance from the front wheel. The rear wheel profile was again informed by the Sub50 whitepaper, focusing on the rejected 59.5mm deep rear profile, as well as the deep rear profile and the Enve 4.5 rear wheel design.
To further squeeze out every last bit of margin, I also chose to use internal nipples for the wheels. This is probably worth less than 0.25 W at 48km/h, but I was pretty committed at this point, and they look so good. Spoiler: it's close enough that this probably helped.
The hypothesis was that I could utilize the older and rejected by modern aero engineers faster front wheel shape, combined with Continental's Aero 111 tire, to compensate for the lack of stability at higher yaw rates, while also gaining sufficient low yaw performance to negate the benefit of the deeper wheels. We are talking about only a couple of watts or a couple of thousandths of a difference in CDA, so this felt possible.
Testing for this using the traditional VE method ultimately turned out to be a nightmare. First, this wheel design, without the Aero 111 on the front, while not as bad as those from a few generations ago, is not particularly stable in crosswinds, leading to variability in the data. Second, it's pretty windy around here, so to combat that, I needed to find both a still day and a ride relatively fast. Conducting 2-2.5 km test runs at 48 km/h resulted in small data sets due to my limited physical abilities. Third, the wheels seemed likely to be relatively close in terms of aero performance. To gather more information, I ended up purchasing a Velocomp Aeropod sensor at a relatively good price. This device isn't exactly regarded as best-in-class, but I figured that in the worst case, I could use it as a wind speed sensor to help make the collected data easier to analyze. In this case, using Aerolab in GC and the new Velocomp Aero software yielded results that were largely the same.
The first set of data was collected to characterize the tire combinations to test, with the front tire being either a 28mm GP5000 S TR or a 29mm Aero 111, with the rear tire always being a 28mm GP5000 STR. For the sake of calibrating the CDA difference to previous testing and because I had access to it on that day, I also included an Enve 6.7 with 28mm GP5000 TTR tires. It was a relatively windless day, with winds under 3km/h. With 7 runs each, evaluating the median 5, I ended up with the following results (CDA):
- Enve
- DFS (Aero 111) +0.001
- Polaris (GP5k S TR) +0.004
- Polaris (Aero 111) +0.004
- DFS (GP5K S TR) +0.008
This small sample size test utilized a 2.5km out-and-back course with a brake-free turn at the midpoint. Given my analysis methods, I considered this sufficient to know that the relative CDAs weren't totally nuts and that I would proceed with further investigation of configurations #2 and #3.
The next test consisted of 26 total laps, testing only combinations #2 and #3 with 13 laps of each on a 3.2km out-and-back course with a brake-free turn at the midpoint. This was completed on a single afternoon, although there was some variation in wind conditions, with winds reaching up to 10 km/h. While the runs had some speed variation, this was tested at an average of around ~20 mph or 32 km/h. This data uses wind speed data from the sensor collected at 1hz. CDA differences:
- Overall: Polaris -0.001 (right at the error)
- Median 9 of ea. compared: Polaris -0.0003 (virtual tie, well within the error)
- "Windless" runs with consistent ground speed and wind speed: DFS -0.003
The standard error is 0.001 on the overall and 0.002 on the windless runs.
If you combine Aero and RR, the Polaris is likely still the faster setup in most solo riding conditions and seems to sail much better. However, at higher speeds and/or in lower crosswind situations, the DFS wheels are likely to be faster by 1.5-2w at 48 km/h, at least with the Aero111 fitted. Prior to having the sensor, teasing out that difference would have been much more difficult for me at my skill level, and it presents an interesting wrinkle to consider. Of course, the Aeropod, being a relatively budget device, only senses forward wind speed, so we have no information regarding yaw angles; therefore, there's not much more I can say than "it's interesting."
Conclusion on these wheelsOverall, with a decent amount of mileage/use on these wheels, as well as some performance testing, I feel that the wild guesses I made when buying this wheelset from DFS have paid off. The wheelset is light, reliable enough, and fast enough that I am very happy with the purchase. Going forward, I intend for these to be my new benchmark, and I am selling my deeper Polaris wheels, despite those wheels likely being an overall faster package. The DFS wheels, when equipped with the Aero 111 tire, likely perform better in situations when I am more likely to be dropped in a group, but have lower performance when riding alone. However, the lower weight just makes the DFS wheels more fun to ride.
I consider these results to be more directional than precise. The aero differences are only a couple of watts at best in most, and this whole analysis is right up against the standard error. I used the conversion here of 0.003 in terms of CDA, to just over 2 watts at 48 km/h. This novel also does not reveal much when considering wheels with significantly different rim profiles and spoke profiles/counts, such as the XMCarbonSpeed wheels.
I also consider the performance of these wheels to be dependent on the usage of the Aero 111. While it may seem counterintuitive to base a wheel choice on a single tire, we also live in a reality where the cost of the rims used for these wheels isn't significantly different from the MSRP of a top-shelf tire.
Lessons I will take with me to the next wheelset.- Aero differences between wheels are often small, and at this scale, shape seems to matter as much as depth.
- While branded wheels tend to do a lot of design work on rims, it's been largely focused on balancing crosswind stability with speed over the last few years. I believe that the older profiles that have been made into open molds can be made into a fast set of wheels with a bit of homework and the use of the Aero 111 tire as a crutch to help with stability.
- It probably requires a bit of an understanding of aero shapes and fluids, but it does seem that doing simple things like going with profiles with known characteristics and working through the details like internal nipples can help fine-tune a wheelset. It's a bit dangerous for me to have a lot to say on this, since prior testing used different protocols, and there is no such thing as the transitive property of cycling aerodynamics, but I do think the cumulative effect of those little things made a difference and helped me avoid my past disappointments with wheels that tested slower than I had hoped.
I hope the overall review on the wheels and hubs is helpful, but most of all, I hope that this section on aero is at least interesting to the folks out there looking for performance on a budget and lays out some potential performance tradeoffs that we can make when we can work directly with a factory to choose our hubs, rims and spokes.
More photosGetting ready to go test:
Aftermath:
P.S. Kelly at DFS, I hope you forgive me for browsing your catalog of rims to find the profiles I was looking for and then considering other options. I am really happy with what I got! I know there is a rep on the forum from DFS, so please pass along my gratitude!
P.P.S. Yes, the same bottle was used for all the tests.
Full res photos are here:
https://imgur.com/a/dfs-wheels-qqaUyqe
