Halo Evaura Uni 6D 700C wheelset

Halo seems very proud of its new Evaura Universal 6D 700C wheelset, and quite rightly. These are well-made wheels that can be adapted for a variety of cycles and purposes. The ride quality is excellent, the weight modest and – despite the dishing needed to make it disc-brake compatible – it proved impossible to provoke them into twisting or flexing.

The idea behind this wheelset is to make it as adaptable as possible to the new rash of wheel and braking standards that is spreading across the industry. While most conventional road frames take a 130mm rear axle, disc brake-equipped bikes are commonly adopting the 135mm found on mountain bikes. (Mountain bike rear axles are themselves now getting longer, but that's another story...)

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Additionally, running a 135mm rear axle on a short-chainstay bike can lead to chainline problems when conventional road cranks are fitted. SRAM and others have developed offset cranksets for such bikes and Halo has developed hub adapters that work with both conventional and offset cranks, to allow any combination of axle length, chainstay length or crank offset. And Ison says there are adapters in the pipeline to allow these hubs to be used with a thru-axle.

The rear hub came fitted with an 11-speed Shimano-compatible freehub, which took my 10-speed cassette with the help of an adapter, but all other freehub flavours are also available. In fact, all that's missing is a Shimano Center Lock rotor option, which may rule these out for you. It's actually a slightly bewildering array of options but there's helpful advice on the website, and the nice people at Ison are also happy to help if you are in doubt.

My test wheels came with adapters for switching between a 130 and 135mm rear axle length. This is very easy to do and requires only a couple of 5mm and one 10mm hex keys to unscrew the end caps and swap them over. Repositioning of the rotor is achieved with a simple plastic shim and some extra-long disc bolts. With some combinations of axle length and cranks it would also be necessary to re-dish the wheel, which gives you an idea of the levels to which you might need to go to get the maximum versatility out of these wheels.

While you are in there, it's a simple matter to pull off the freehub for a clean and grease. The six pawls live inside the hub rather than being part of the freehub itself. The freehub proved smooth, with a light buzz that rose to a high whine at speed, prompting me to get off and look for a leaf stuck in my wheel the first time I rode downhill. A smear of grease inside the hub calmed this down a bit.

June is hardly the most demanding month for kit testing, especially wheels which may get soaked with salty winter spray, so all I can report on the quality of bearings and internals is that everything was as good as new when I opened the hubs up at the end of the test.

Most of the cleverness is in the 6D Road Disc rear hub, but Halo has combined this with a conventional non-disc brake rim to allow the wheels to be used with either disc or conventional brakes. It argues that if you are in doubt about whether to adopt disc brakes you can future-proof yourself, should you wish to make the change later. Certainly the quality of these wheels is such that they are worth hanging onto and may well be better than anything supplied with a disc brake-equipped road bike up to around £2,000.

You will find the rim surfaces have plenty of bite – I use Swiss Stop pads and they work really well on the Halo rims, even in the wet. I did find a slight manufacturing defect in one brake surface that manifested itself as a click when braking on the first ride, but I got rid of this with some wet and dry paper. It annoyed my inner perfectionist to look down and see a disc mount spinning uselessly on a rim brake-equipped bike. Disc brake users may be similarly unsettled at the idea of using a rim with a braking surface.

Each wheel is laced with 24 straight-pull (non-aero) spokes, 2-crossed on both sides. This helps deal with the twisting forces exerted by disc brakes and transferred into a very solid, flex-free build. Even at the rim, with the pads set close, I couldn't provoke any rubbing despite wrenching the bike up the steepest local hills, out of the saddle and in the highest gear I could turn. No flex means no wasted effort, and I had no difficulty matching or beating some of the Personal Bests set on the same bike with my regular wheels.

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Straight-pull spokes are not loved by all bike mechanics because, should a spoke get seized into the nipple, there's nothing to stop the spoke turning at the hub end. This is worse with non-aero spokes, as you cannot get a grip on the spoke to prevent it turning. Added to this, aluminium nipples are prone to corrosion (I've known them crumble to dust at the turn of a spoke key), so if you plan on running these wheels through the winter you will need to be meticulous with your cleaning and maintenance. For this reason I've marked these wheels down a little for longevity.

> How to replace a broken spoke

The modestly aero rims measure 22mm deep, nowhere near enough to be troubled by crosswinds, and the 19mm internal width worked fine with a 25mm tyre and would accept wider if you have the room. The rim hook is bona-fide tubeless-ready, allowing a tubeless tyre to snap into place with a very satisfying crack. It was easy to get a tubeless tyre inflated with a compressor. The rim tape is tubeless-ready but easy to pinch if you have to use a lever to get the tyre on – which I did. Tyre fitting itself was tight but not impossible, and actually proved easier with tubeless than the non-tubeless tyres I fitted.

The all-black scheme with red spoke nipples looks good, the white graphics are understated, and the whole package looks and feels like quality kit, as the ride seems to confirm.

Verdict

Good quality wheels with highly adaptable hubs that make them suitable for a wide range of bikes