Considering the relative ages of Hunt against some of its competitors in the wheel space it’s made quite an impact in a relatively short space of time. You don’t need to look too hard to find its products at the top end of disciplines as disparate as top end road and crit racing, all the way through to self supported ultra distance races, both on and off road.
At the top of the brand’s wheel pyramid for road, cyclo-cross, and all-road is the Limitless, which consists of a pair of wheelsets of 48mm and 60mm depth. The 48mm option is currently listed as “The fastest disc brake wheel up to and including 50mm” and given that the introduction of TaperLock carbon spokes and an updated hub haven’t materially affected the aerodynamics of these new wheelsets it’s safe to assume that the Hunt 48 Limitless UD Carbon Disc will at least share that crown.
As for the 60mm options? Well they sit in our list of the best road bike wheels, and scored 4.5 stars in our testing. We also conducted our own wind tunnel testing on the 60’s, along with nine other aero options, which you’d do well to read through too.
Tried and tested rims
Before we dive into the spokes and hubs it’s worth noting that both the 46mm and the 60mm rims on these new wheelsets are common with the current Limitless 48 and 60. Both options feature wide internals (22.5mm and 21mm respectively), hooked shoulders, and are tubeless ready. They’re optimised aerodynamically for a 28mm tyre, but given the internal width they’re perfectly capable of taking tyres beyond the 30mm mark.
The Limitless moniker denotes the slightly different construction method used in the creation of the rims. While Hunt have produced some alarmingly comprehensive, publicly available white papers on each of its Limitless rim profiles, the short version is that it produces a rim profile in carbon that is strong enough (and ETRTO compliant), and then uses a far lower density polymer to build out the rim shape to the desired aero profile. This results in a saving of around 50g per rim, without any aero penalty.
Carbon spokes
Carbon spokes are definitely in the territory of bike bling, but often they have one pretty clear drawback; often they are physically bonded to the rim…
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