Anyway, got my first race on them last night. I can't say it was my best ever, it was one of my worst ever, I got an absolutely terrible start and I was popping out of my pedals, like having very-worn cleats. I've been using the shimano cleats with the xpedo pedals because up till now, they worked better with the shimano ones than the xpedo ones. I'm going to have to go back to the xpedo or just keep the shimano pedals on, which isn't a big deal. I think I was also suffering from the effects of the weekend gravel-grinder race, where I pulled an astounding 6th in the race. That by itself isn't very important to me, but the fact that I did it on a freaking fat-bike and the day after a 46 mile mountain bike ride made it one of those rare feats of athletic ability and I don't think I was anywhere near full recovery.

The race course was a mix of nordic ski trails that have very steep ups and downs and grass, which means lots of rolling resistance, then flow trails, then very rooty bootleg/original trails that were put in by hikers long before the system trails were established. This gave a pretty good mix of terrain. There were several sections to air out over doubles and table-tops and some high-G turns to really push the wheels into the berm, etc. Some of the rooty stuff was on the downhill, and some was on the uphill.

The wheels performed great. I didn't have the rear set up tubeless yet, but everything about the wheels performed great in the race. They were absolutely stiff enough for pushing hard at the expert XC level, no issues with confidence and boosting off of terrain. I really didn't think about them much, but they did feel a little more spritely while climbing and rolling than what I usually run. The setup saves some decent weight over my other XC wheelset.

I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, I think this is a pretty purpose-built wheelset, but for the application it worked great and I'm anxious to do some more races on them and see how they hold up.

Finally got these wheels on dirt!  They worked out awesome!  Felt good in the turns, held the lines at high-G, rolled great, etc.  First race is next week!

Oxive, a new-to-the-scene carbon rim manufacturer, contacted me and asked me to do a review of their wheels/rims. They appear to be a new Chinese carbon rim manufacturer with several different wheel-sizes and rim widths.

https://www.oxivecarbon.com/

I'm happy with my AM wheelset and my fat wheelsets, but I was thinking of building up a new XC wheelset this summer for racing. My current wheelset is built on Nexties that were DH and enduro raced for a few seasons starting in 2014, then re-built for a rigid bike, later a hardtail, then re-built a 3rd time for my Pivot 429SL. To be sure, I've beat these to hell and back and if they spontaneously exploded tomorrow, I wouldn't be disappointed. They aren't heavy with a DT240/XTR combo, but weight has come down a bit with some of the newer carbon rims. For this reason, I selected the 290g 29er XC racing rims. According to the site, these have a T700 and T800 layup. I asked for the rims, rather than complete wheels, since I prefer to build my own wheels.

https://www.oxivecarbon.com/products...-free-shipping

That is the correct link, however, if you look at the page, you'll see the correct rim is shown. I pointed this out, but I'm not sure they understood.

At first, I wasn't quite sure if I was getting one or two rims. I felt that they were more than generous in supplying a rim and I've been traveling a lot and unable to respond to a lot of email or messages, but turned out it was two rims.

The package arrived, everything seemed normal about delivery and delivery time. The lead-time seemed perfectly normal.

These are asymmetric rims. The finish and quality look great. Graphics are not stickers. Spoke holes look like they are painted/coated the same as the outside of the rim. Valve-hole looks to be drilled and not coated. No weird issues noted (no pieces of loose carbon, no delaminations, etc.).

So I got to building them. I used the DT Swiss and leonard spoke calculators. The DT Swiss one mainly to get the hub specs, and the leonard to double-check the offset calculation. The ERD appeared to work out fine. I forgot to snap a picture of the spokes from inside the rim, but again, ERD appeared to work out just fine. I used slightly longer nipples than normal for this build, due to using 28 spokes and the light-weight nature, so went with 14mm spokes. Sapim Laser 2.0/1.5/2.0 spokes. Front hub DT Swiss 240, rear hub DT Swiss 180.

No issues building these up. They went together well. Was able to get them massively-OCD-true, just like any other carbon rim.

After getting them laced and trued, I put place-holder tires on with tubes to set my rim-strip. The tyvek tape weighs all of 4g, haha! To date, I had just been using it for my fat-wheels, but it turns out that I can just use the full-width over the rim and then use an xacto knife to cut along the edges of the rim, which I think many people already know about. It's easy and relatively quick.

I won't get to ride them until around next weekend or even later, due to work trips, and I'll need to get some lighter and heavier XC tires for this and for the other wheelset. This saves a pretty significant amount of rotating weight and non-rotating weight compared to my normal wheelset, so I'm looking forward to using it this XC race season. Most of the races are on fairly soft surfaces and around 1-2hrs or so. We do have some harder/rougher/longer races though, so I'll probably switch these out for some of the races where I'm more concerned about durability than short-term weight saving.