Simply incredibly well thought out hand-built wheels from a company with its priorities right.
- Brand: Halo
- Product: Skelta MT2 wheels
- Price: £204.99 front, £324.99 rear = £529.98 (maths!)
- From: Ison Distribution
- Tested by: Benji for 6 months
Pros
- Impressively durable
- Class-leading engagement at this price point
- Good value
Cons
- Bit boring looking
- Over the 2kg mark
Shall I bang on about the importance of wheels to the whole bicycle riding experience? Yes. Yes, I will. Wheels genuinely can make or break how your bike rides and also just how feel about your bike. Poor wheels can make you dislike your bike and – by extension – dislike mountain biking.
Getting straight to the point, we weighed these wheels as 2,240g. So they aren’t especially light but they aren’t absolute tanks either. They are the same sort of weight as wheelsets that cost £100 or so less. What do the Skeltas have going for them for that extra hundred quid?
They have two things going for them. The engagement is rapid, at 3°. That is much faster than a DT Swiss M1900 (15° engagement). It’s also appreciably faster than a Hunt Enduro V3 (9° engagement). Is rapid engagement all that it’s cracked up to be? Yes, to a degree(!) it is. I do think that 3° is about as fast as you can go without the engagement potentially becoming an issue in terms exacerbating pedal kickback on full suspension bikes as well as generally making a bike behave ‘nervously’, but there’s no denying that faster engagement is a good thing, especially in technical terrain.
The other thing the Skeltas have going for them is durability. After half a year of riding, they remain true, completely dent free, smooth spinning and even the freehub splines look in good nick and the tape remains in place despite numerous tyre swaps. There’s very few (alloy) wheelsets that have remained this way after six months of our testing. I can’t think of any in fact. There’s a couple of superficial scratches on the rear rim and that’s it. FWIW the rims are made from 6069 T6 heat-treated aluminium with a seamless welded join and shot-peened surface.
The other other thing (yes, I know) is that the Halo Skeltas just don’t have anything weird or annoying about them. The end caps don’t fall off. The nipples are brass. The spokes are trad J-bend and triple-butted. The rotor mount is 6-bolt. The internal rim width is 30mm.
Overall
I’d go so far as to say that there is no point buying any alloy wheelsets that cost more than the Halo Skeltas. You may get lighter alloy wheels but they won’t be anywhere near as easy to live with or as reliable. The next step after these wheels is all the way up to carbon wheels, at twice the price. The Skelta wheels are just incredibly well thought out hand-built wheels from a company with its priorities right. Recommended.