Hunt 30 Carbon Dynamo Disc

A while back I tested the Hunt Superdura Dynamo disc wheels which were excellent. These Carbon 30 Disc Dynamo wheels are also excellent. They're a fair bit lighter and a lot more expensive, so whether they're a better option for you will depend on what your specific needs are in a wheelset. But they're certainly great performers.

• Pros: Light for dyno wheels, great quality, new freehub treatment works like a charm
• Cons: Double the price of the Superdura wheelset; alloy nipples aren't as sturdy as brass

These wheels, at 1,735g the pair, are certainly light for dynamo wheels. The majority of the weight is in the front wheel (940g); to give an idea of the build weight, the rear at 795g came in 65g less than the Reynolds ATR 650 I took off, and the wheelset overall is just over 100g heavier. I'd consider 1,735g reasonably light for a well-built, wide-rimmed adventure wheel even if it wasn't sporting a dynamo. These wheels are a full 300g lighter than the Superdura Dyno wheels we tested: that's a significant saving.

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The rim is a 30mm deep profile, made from unidirectional T24/30 carbon fibre with the spoke holes reinforced with a 3K weave. It's a reasonably wide profile, with a 27mm external width and a 21mm internal profile. According to the ETRTO chart that would mean that you'd be fitting a minimum of a 35mm tyre but realistically most people will be using wheels like these with tyres in the 28-32mm range.

The wheels came with tubeless rim tape fitted, and a hole pricked for the valve. Fitting Schwalbe G-One Speeds was, as usual, a joy: put them on, pump them up. The rim tape was well fitted and both rims sealed first time, even with my well-used tyres that didn't have perfectly clean beads. I swapped the G-Ones out later for some Panaracer Gravel King 32mm tyres and I didn't have any issues with those either, nor the crazy non-tubeless reTyre zip-on system that I'm currently trying out.

> Buyer's Guide: 16 of the best gravel and adventure tyres

Build quality is excellent throughout. The wheels came tightly built and true, and they've stayed tightly built and true. With 28 spokes front and rear they're built for bikepacking and ultra-distance rather than fully loaded touring; Hunt recommends a 115kg limit for rider and luggage. The Carbon 30s use alloy nipples as opposed to the brass ones in the heavier Superdura wheels. Personally I've found that nipples are a common point of failure on wheelsets, and alloy nipples are more prone to corrosion than their brass counterparts. If it was up to me I'd always spec brass nipples – even on a lightweight wheelset – if it was designed for long distances and rough treatment as these are. That being said, I've had no issues at all, and you get spares in the box.

Dynamo

The SON Delux dynamo is specifically designed for road riding. It weighs just 395g and when turned off generates just 0.4W of drag, barely any more than a standard front hub. The efficiency is rated at 65%, and the dynamo outputs 3W of power at 20km/h, so to power your lights or your USB charger you can expect to be putting less than 5W into the system. I've mostly been using the dynamo with a Busch & Muller IQ-X front light and a Supernova E3 rear, and the dynamo kicks out plenty enough power to light your way. On steeper sections – above about 12% – my speed would drop to the point where the beam would start to flicker a bit, but over about 10km/h I was getting a nice constant beam. For USB charging with an Igaro D1 I found about 15km/h to be the minimum for a useful charge current.

The SON Delux has a clever pressure compensation system. Dynamos heat up in use, and the air inside them expands and forces itself out of the hub. When they cool they suck air back in, and usually this will be damp air being sucked through the seals, which can accelerate corrosion. The Son Delux uses a coiled tube attached to an external port. Wet air that gets sucked into the tube never reaches the inside of the hub, and it's expelled again once the dynamo heats up in use. SON claims this will increase the bearing life beyond 50,000km. SON offers a five-year warranty on the hub, and the wheels as a whole are warrantied for two years.

The SON hub is a 12mm thru-axle design, with an insert if you want to run it quick release. I was using the hub in a thru-axle fork, and for a while I struggled with the hub rotating in the dropouts – curiously, in the opposite direction to travel – which pulled the dynamo leads off the connectors. The solution is to make sure your thru-axle is done up nice and tight; I had to re-grease the cam on mine so that I could get the necessary load to stop the hub moving. Since I have, it's been absolutely fine.

At the rear Hunt is using its 4Season Disc hub that has extra shielding for the EZO cartridge bearings inside. Both front and rear hubs use standard J-bend spokes which should be fairly easy to find a replacement for if you pop one out on tour. The wheels come with two spares of each length to take with you too, plus a spoke key, 6-bolt adaptors for the Centerlock disc mounts, tubeless rim tape (fitted) and tubeless valves.

Hunt has started using a new coating on its 6-pawl freehub called H_CERAMIK. The freehub body is alloy, but it undergoes a ceramic hardening process not unlike the one Mavic has successfully used on its rims over the years. The process makes the surface of the alloy extremely hard, and there's no need for a steel insert to stop the sprockets biting into the metal. It's excellent: even with a steel bite guard there's still normally a bit of notching on a freehub after a couple of months of use. With this freehub you can see where the sprockets have been in contact but there's no indentation at all; the cassette just slipped straight off after 1,000km of testing. HG spline, Campagnolo and SRAM XD/XDR options are available.

Conclusion

Overall these wheels are excellent. They're light and well built, the front dynamo is as good as they come for road riding and the rear hub has been great too. They're sensibly built, come with spares, and are set up for the long haul. They're £500 more than the Superduras, so is it worth you spending the extra? Well, there's a 300g weight saving to be had, which is reasonably substantial. For a £500 bigger spend that's a Hairsine Ratio of 0.6, and you can see from our article on saving weight on the cheap that there are more cost-effective weight savings to be had if shaving the grams is your primary concern.

> 221 tubeless wheelsets to choose from

The main difference here is the carbon rim, and there's certainly an argument that a well-built carbon rim is a better choice than an alloy one for something like an ultradistance race, or any event where you're likely to be riding tired. I've put a ding in many an alloy rim over the years with a careless choice of line, or just by riding into a pothole when I'm knackered and my critical faculties aren't at their sharpest. If you're running tubeless that can affect the tyre's ability to seal. I know it's possible to break a carbon rim doing the same kind of thing – and that would be a worse outcome – but my experience of good quality carbon rims thus far (and Danny MacAskill's) is that they're very hard to break, and if you slam them into a pothole by mistake when running tubeless, by far the most likely thing to happen is, well, nothing at all. With rim brakes you have the issues of inferior braking and rim wear, but with discs those are no longer downsides.

Having asked my ultradistance pals, those who are swapping to carbon seem to be doing it for aerodynamic reasons rather than weight or strength. As I found out in the wind tunnel, there are more significant savings to be had by making your bike slightly more aerodynamic than slightly lighter, and over the course of a week or more of riding 18 hours a day (if you're doing the TCR) those savings will add up to a significant chunk of time. That's why ultradistance racers all have aerobars: the aero gains far outweigh the weight penalty.

This 30mm rim is called an aero rim by Hunt but realistically these rims are a bit shallow to make a big difference to your drag; those gains generally start to stack up somewhere north of 40mm. Hunt doesn't yet offer its 50mm aero disc rim in a dynamo build; if it did it probably wouldn't be any more expensive than this wheelset, since the 50mm and 30mm standard builds are both the same price. That would seem to me to be the ideal rim in Hunt's range if you're making a carbon dynamo wheelset aimed at ultradistance riders.

These wheels are really very good, but for me they fall a bit between two stools. That's not to say they're not good wheels, because they definitely are. And many people will want to go for carbon because, well, carbon. For me the extra outlay wouldn't be justified. But it might be for you. Or you just might not be bothered whether it is or not. Who am I to judge? I like to spend money on nice things too.

Verdict

Excellent lightweight dynamo wheels for the long haul