Lightweight wheels

Bicycle Express is excited to Launch the New 2011 range of Lightweight Wheels hand crafted in Germany.  Lightweight has been a big player for many years among the pro's but it's now here for you to enjoy as well.  

The Lightweight history is strongly linked to the best and most successful road bike pros of the World. These guys were the first riders, who raced the revolutionary Lightweight wheels at World Campionships and all the big races on the planet and spread the word into the international road racing scene.

Handcrafted in Germany

Lightweight – there is nearly no roadie that doesn´t get shiny eyes when hearing that word. No wonder, the name Lightweight is a synonym for THE perfect wheel. Light, stiff, aerodynamic, durable, fast – and simple outstanding beautiful. Lightweight – also a piece of German craftsmanship and a story of success with a whole bunch of homeland roots. What started in the middle Nineties with the invention of the Lightweight wheels by the prime fathers Rudolf Dierl and Heinz Obermayer, who worked very hard in their small garage near Munich on finding the right procedures and inventing the perfect tools until they were happy with what they got: Building the best wheel of the world! Meanwhile Lightweight wheels have approved in some details – but there is still one thing to build them: Lot´s of handcraft!

16 hours to get the perfect wheel

16 hours to get the perfect wheel The “birth” of every Lightweight wheel starts in one of most advanced fiber-reinforced composite facilities in Friedrichshafen near the Lake Constance. Here all the raw materials like special Carbon fiber, epoxy resins, special foam bodys, parts of the hubs and lots of other parts are delivered to build the Lightweight wheels. A complex procedure in that many work only can be done by human hand all the small parts are put together within one to two hours into a special wheel building body-form that was exclusively built for Lightweight. After that procedure the filled form moves into a special stove where a detailed and precisely defined “baking process” takes some more hours. The result is a raw wheel that comes out of the form and passes a first finishing work.
     Specially skilled specialists clean the blank, mill some redundant material at precisely defined parts and finally build the requirement for the next production steps. Therefore the reworked blanks move to Hailfingen. In Hailfingen the precisely prepared blank moves step by step into a ready to race wheel. After another deburing process the hubs are going to be produced – also by human hand – the hub body is glued into the wheel and finally all the small inner hub parts are assembled to a complete hub inside the wheel. No robot will ever be able to do that work! A second heating process joins all the parts to a real Lightweight wheel.
     Last step is a final finishing section, the sealing and labeling of the wheels what needs another two hours of human hand work. Now the Lightweight wheels are ready for use and are shipped to a place somewhere in the world – where the are going to be longingly expected by somebody with that special shine in his eyes.

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