Scope Cycling (Netherlands) – After 1.5 year of product development, Scope Cycling proudly announces the launch of their all new O2 Off-road wheelset, specially developed for gravel and XC mountain bikes. Based in The Netherlands, it took the Scope team one and a half year to develop this new product.

When starting this project, it was the aim of Scope to develop the best-in-class off-road wheelset for the use in gravel bikes and XC mountain bikes. Where most of their competitors are focusing on one specific area like; weight, lateral stiffness, comfort, or durability, it was the aim of both co-founders; Rik Kusters and Nieck Busser, to combine all the important product characteristics into one all-round off-road wheelset, thereby ticking all the boxes. In order to determine the industry standards for each of product characteristics, they first tested several of their competitor’s wheelsets, making use of field tests and their own developed test devices. Based on these outcomes, they defined their development goals.

After several iterative loops supported by 6 prototypes, Scope finally found the perfect balance between lateral stiffness (for efficient power transformation), and radial compliance (for comfort) in a 23-mm high, and 31-mm width full carbon rim with a 3-mm off-set. Furthermore, their rim makes use of a 25-mm internal width tubeless-ready hookless tirebed devel¬oped in cooperation with Schwalbe tires for perfect mounting, inflation, and on-pressure properties.

According Scope’s philosophy, durability goes above weight. For that reason, no compromises have been made in regard to the bearings, sealing, spokes, or rim profile. Hence, in order to be best-in-class when it comes to weight as well, Scope developed its own LOCAL REINFORCEMENT TECHNOLOGY (LRT). This unique production technology locally reinforces the rim at the spoke holes, whereas normally the entire spoke hole section is reinforced. By making use of this unique technology, Scope has been able to reduce the overall wall thickness of their rims and realized a weight reduction of 10%. This resulted in a total set weight of 1380 gram, which given the rim width, the tubeless ready system and overall durability of this wheelset is unique in the market.

Scope has always developed and produced its own hubs since it’s their believe that wheels should be built as a system. By building the wheels as system, the geometry of the hubs is optimized to create an optimal stiffness with optimal spoke tension. The extra wide flange distance of 61 mm for the rear hub results in a lateral stiffness of 51 N/mm for the rear wheels while the 2:1 spoke pattern combined with the 3 mm off set in the rim ensures that the spoke tension of the Non-Drive Side and Drive Side are near-equal for better lateral stiffness and durability performance.

Their own developed hub-set makes use of a four-pawl engagement system in combination with a 34 tooth freehub body. Furthermore, the hubs are equipped with SKF bearings (or optionally CeramicSpeed). The Scope O2 wheelset is available with boost hubs, regular hubs, and both Shimano and XD freehub bodies. In addition end-caps are available that make the wheel-set compatible with the most important quick release and through-axle standards.

Rik Kusters, Co-founder Scope Cycling “Although we already do have over 4 years of experience in the development of carbon wheels, it was quite a challenge to develop our Scope O2 wheelset. Even though, the materials used for our O2 wheelset are equal to the materials we use in our road series wheelsets, the use and so the requirements are completely different. For that reason, especially the definition phase of this project took way more time than expected, and seemed to be critical in order develop the best-in-class off-road wheelset.”



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