Reserve 30|HD Carbon Wheelset Review

You’ve probably already heard of Reserve Wheels. If you hadn’t, you might have noticed when their wheels carried Team Visma – Lease a Bike’s Jonas Vingegaard to victory at Stage 11 of the Tour de France this year. We’re in a very different world today with a review of the trail-hungry all mountain 30|HD wheelset. Reserve has serious street cred and I think I first learned about them through watching Danny MacAskill do incredible things on their wheels when I was a teenager. I have loved putting them through their paces throughout the Northwest.

Reserve 30|HD Carbon Wheelset Features:

• Do-it-all carbon wheelset
• Hookless bead design for added durability
• Asymmetric rim shape for stiffer, stronger wheels with equalized tension
• DT 350 or I9 Hydra hubs with XD/Microspline or 6-bolt/Centerlock
• Offset spoke holes and shaped rim bed for easy tubeless installation
• Boost hub spacing
• No rider weight limit
• Lifetime guarantee
• Specs: 20mm rim depth and 30mm internal width
• Weight 1829 g as tested with I9 Hydra hubs (wheelset weight)
• MSRP: $1599-$1699

Wheels with a backbone:

This has been the summer of the 30|HD’s for me. Just about every mile I’ve biked has been aboard the Reserve 30|HD’s, and I’ve loved them. We’ve done everything from Spokane’s Beacon Hill to Bend to Nelson to the famed Seven Summits near Rossland. There’s also been plenty of scrappy, weird off-kilter riding in the Idaho panhandle and Schweitzer’s upper and lower basin. If you know the PNW, you know these are great areas. If you don’t know the PNW just assume they are really great and epic.

Reserve offers four different mountain bike-specific wheelsets. They each have a slightly different niche, but what they have in common are a lack of a rider weight limit, easy tubeless setup, excellent ride quality and a lifetime guarantee. There are very few carbon wheel sets out there with a lifetime guarantee so this is a big deal. We’ve got the 28|XC as the more thoroughbred cross-country offering; 30|SL which is a confident but lightweight trail wheel; the 30|HD is more of a do-everything wheel made for aggressive trail riding. Lastly there’s the 31|DH which is their world championship-winning downhill offering. There are five Reserve wheels that are E-bike compatible: Reserve 30, the Reserve 30|HD, the Reserve 30|HD AL and 30|SL AL, and the Reserve 31|DH.

Like I mentioned above, the 30|HD’s have an asymmetric design with offset spokes and a bead bump. This really helps when seating new tubeless tires. This is one place where the 30|HD’s really shine: seating tubeless tires was really easy and didn’t require any tools, thanks principally to the offset spokes and bead bump. The factory rim tape gave me zero trouble, and the consensus on these is that they tend to be hassle free across multiple tire changes.

The Fillmore valve stems that ship with the wheels deserve a review all their own just because they are so great. Basically, they’ve redesigned the valve so that they’re still Presta compatible but now the valve ‘action’ happens down at the bottom of the stem within the tire. This means they don’t get gunked up, and you don’t have to pull the core to push air through them for seating. I literally just pointed my air compressor’s hose down the Fillmore and it seated my bead. Incredible.

The 30|HD has a relatively shallow rim profile which helps with overall ride quality and bump compliance. ‘Compliance’ is perceived as a blend of the material qualities of the wheels, plus what tire pressures they allow you to run. The 20mm depth really helps with compliance and, with appropriate tire pressure, made me feel like I’d upgraded my fork along with my wheels. They really shine on fast rocky sections. While the ‘HD’ might make this wheel sound heavy, it’s actually roughly 10g lighter than the outgoing Reserve 30 which it replaces, and some of that is thanks to this shallower 20mm depth.

I personally rode the I9 Hydra hubs and holy cow are they magical. These engage roughly every half a degree for a total of 690 points of engagement. They are INCREDIBLE. I’ve never had a hub with quite so much engagement and this was one place where the gear really did translate into helping me ride better. Having near-infinite engagement helped me ratchet up steep techy sections that previously stymied my momentum. The sound is high-pitched but quiet, and they manage to sound expensive but not in-your-face. I personally liked that the sound was understated and never love a hub that you can hear from a quarter mile away.

A key reason to buy Reserve carbon wheels are their legendary durability. Back when these were still the in-house Santa Cruz wheels, Danny MacAskill took these down a flight of stairs without a rear tire. Yup. At this point it’s the stuff of legend, but it’s more than just marketing hype. The types of wheels that myself and most consumers usually ride are cheaper alloy wheels. They’re reasonably light, compliant-ish, stiff-ish, and, more than anything, affordable. But these rims almost inevitably develop dings and dents in the sidewall with even moderately aggressive riding. This can lead to structural instability and issues seating tubeless tires. The 30|HD is going to give you a major leg up in durability.

I thought that the 30|HD has a really superior blend of stiffness and compliance. Its lateral stiffness is really excellent; I’m a heavier rider and the 30|HD only inspired confidence. It stayed true to the line I chose, whether it was a good line or not! The 30mm width is a great fit for the 2.3-2.5″ tires that most folks are running these days; I didn’t have any issues with flex in the tire at the pressures I was running.

One of the fun parts about buying these wheels off of stock is just how insanely good they are. I think these are likely near the top of the heap for carbon hoops all out, mind you – Reserve is truly an industry force. But it was such a treat going from my stock alloys to these carbon wheels. They are just so much lighter, stiffer and compliant. If you’re going from one high-dollar carbon rim to another, of course the effect is going to be less pronounced. I still think you’ll see a benefit, though. Plus the lifetime warranty is nothing to be sneezed at.

Setup: I’m 5’11” and 200lbs and I set these wheelsets up with 3.5-4 oz of sealant. I ran them at 22 PSI front and 24 PSI rear most of the time, sometimes 24/28 for long climbing days. 

Buy Now: Available from EVO