double walled rims for muni

Unicycles and Equipment
1

Hi,

What is the advandtage of aluminum doublewall rims with reinforced eyelets
on Muni unicycles?

Thanks

2

A double walled rim will supply extra strength for some of the harsher treatment that Unicycles receive during off road riding (muni). If you plan to do drops, or jumps over a few inches in height then it would be advisable to go with some form of double walled rim.

3

Eyelets are where the spoke nipples go.

A rim with non-reinforced eyelets carries all the spoke tension and rider weight on the drilled aluminum surface of the rim.

A rim with reinforced eyelets has little round inserts to help distribute the load.

Here is a rim without reinforced eyelets:

Here is a rim with reinforced eyelets:

A rim without reinforced eyelets can crack at the eyelets under extreme use. As you might imagine, a cracked rim is a dead rim. The primary advantage is this increased durability if you’re doing crazy stuff.

Some reinforced eyelet rims are also lighter, because the use of the reinforcements allows the metal rim wall to be thinner. This varies from rim to rim, though.

(Pics stolen from Bicycling Review.)

4

I don’t really think reinforced eyelets are a big deal, but double-walled rims are definitely the way to go. If you are doing any real offroading, or decent-sized drops you really don’t want a single-walled rim. The larger your wheel, the more strength the rim needs to have to keep it from “tacoing” and to stay true.

5

Using a double wall on a rim is like building with square tubing instead of C channel.

I started to write a technical explanation on why they are stronger that single walled rims of similar weight but it was sort of longwinded and pretty much common sense. Trust me they are generally stronger.

Another very important factor for MUni rims is width. We tend to put a lot more sideways forces into our wheels than bikes so we need the width to better support our tire sidewalls (my 3.0 Gazz felt like crap on a 32mm rim but feels great on a 46mm rim) and also wider rims take more lateral force to get knocked out of true.

So in short you want double walled and wide, how wide depends on your intended tire, terrain, and your level of weight-weenieness.