wesnewell said:
Chalo said:
The Sun Rhyno Lite is about 21mm inside width, and 27.5mm outside width. It's a good choice for fat tires, and for narrower ones down to about 32mm.
No, it's a lousy choice for fat tires. Good choice for a 35mm tire though. Try using a 2.4" tire on a 21mm inside diameter tire and you stand a bigger risk of it not seating properly and blowing out the tube inflating it. Easier pinch flats. Rolling the tire off the rim when cornering. Wheel (tire) wobble. And having your vbrakes hit the tire when applying. You can avoid that with more spacers, but it also lessens the brakes effectiveness.
I hear what you are saying here-- wider is better when you want to use wide tires. And that's true. But it's also true that the Sun Rhyno Lite is among the wider rims in common circulation, and it's definitely on the short list of wide 700c rims. And it's strong, and cheap. What's not to like?
For the first half of the 1990s, MTB rims wider than about 25mm outside (thus about 18mm inside) were difficult to find. But that coincided with the appearance of tires in the 2.5" width range. Back then, we mounted those big tires on narrow rims because that was what we had to work with. I used to put Fisher Bear Trax 2.6" and Specialized Ground Control Extreme 2.5" tires on sub-20mm wide rims (about 13mm inside width). They worked OK, though to me it seems that ideally a tire should be about twice the inside width of the rim.
For 700c rims wider than the Sun Rhyno Lite, I can think of only a few-- the Velocity Psycho (no longer listed on their website), the Velocity Blunt (almost the same size as the Rhyno Lite) and Blunt 35 (wider), the Surly Rabbit Hole (spendy), the Nimbus unicycle rim I linked to, and a couple of other expensive mountain unicycle rims. If you know of others, please list them.
The Rhyno Lite is a wide mountain bike rim by design, and it's been used for a long time with wider tires than 2.4". It weighs about the same as the Velocity P35, costs half as much, and accepts a rim brake. In 700c there are just not a lot of better options for big tires.
By the way, you are wrong about pinch flats. Fat tires on narrow rims give better suspension characteristics at the same pressure than fat tires on wide rims. You just have to use higher pressure before they'll stabilize, and given enough miles they can wear the tire casing out at the edge of the rim. There are drawbacks to fat tires on narrow rims, but worsened pinch flatting isn't one of them.
