Hunt Enduro V3 Wheels
Intended Use: Enduro
Internal Width: 31.5 mm (front) / 30 mm (rear)
Versions Available:
- Front: 27.5’’ or 29’’; 15 x 110 mm (Boost) axle only
- Rear: 27.5’’ or 29’’; 12 x 148 mm (Boost) axle only
Rim Material: Aluminum
Stated Weights:
- 29’’ Wheelset: 2,096 g
- 27.5’’ Wheelset: 2,022 g
- Mixed (29’’/27.5’’) Wheelset: 2,057 g
MSRP: $649 USD
Intro
It wasn’t too long ago that denting and destroying aluminum rims was a fairly common incident, but while carbon rims have rapidly advanced in their durability and often prove to be brutally strong these days, they can also be brutally expensive. Aluminum wheels have also been seeing some steady improvements in their resilience too, though, and often at a much more approachable price.
We recently rode the prior Hunt Enduro Wide V2 wheels on the Privateer 161 V2 with good results (aside from an initial spoke tension issue), but the new Enduro V3 claims to crank up the durability even higher. Hunt also went back to the drawing board on their hubs, and the new wheels come with their H_Ratchet XL 40T rear hub along with higher quality ABEC-5 bearings front and rear.
Let’s walk through all of the changes to understand more about what are supposedly Hunt’s strongest wheels ever — and stay on the lookout for a Flash Review once our test wheelset arrives.
Design
Hunt changed just about everything with their new Enduro V3 wheelset, but we’ll start by talking through the new rim design. Hunt says that their in-house engineer oversaw 146 hours of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulated stress testing along with real-world impact testing against competitor wheels to inform the design of the new rims, leading to two different front and rear rim shapes.
The Enduro Wide V2 rims used different internal rim widths (33 mm front, 31 mm rear), and while the Enduro V3 sticks to that same principle with a wider 31.5 mm internal width front rim and narrower 30 mm rear rim, the rear rim also adopts a different V-shaped profile for added impact resistance. Hunt’s impact testing chart is included below, but Hunt claims that the new Enduro V3 wheels bring a 40% reduction in spoke pull-through stress and require 20 joules more energy to show initial damage compared to the Enduro Wide V2.
The rims are made from G609 aluminum alloy, which Hunt says is comparable to 6069 and has a 30% tensile strength advantage over the more commonly used 6061 aluminum. The rims still use Hunt’s H-Lock bead seat, which creates small kick-ups in the rim bed for easier tubeless tire seating.
Moving onto the hubs, Hunt has followed many other brands (like OneUp) in taking advantage of that expired DT Swiss patent on their original ratchet design. While the old rear hub’s RapidEngage design offered a faster 5-degree pickup than the new one’s 9 degrees, the H_Ratchet XL 40T design promises to be more durable than the old pawl-based system. The front and rear hubs also get upgraded ABEC-5 bearings from Enduro, and the rear hub gets a choice of SRAM/Shimano HG, Shimano Microspline, or SRAM XD freehubs.
Otherwise, Enduro V3 wheelsets are all hand-built with triple butted spokes from Pillar, with 28 spokes up front and 32 spokes at the rear wheel. As you can see in the comparison chart above, the Enduro V3 isn’t the lightest wheelset of the bunch, but it’s also not notably heavy — and, unlike many of the others which use aluminum nipples for weight savings, Hunt uses brass nipples along with nipple washers for durability and ease of maintenance down the line.
Bottom Line (For Now)
Hunt has clearly invested heavily in making the Enduro V3 wheelset as resilient as possible, and it all sounds pretty compelling on paper. One of the big reasons to run carbon wheels is their tendency to stay true and round, but if Hunt manages to crank up the durability of alloy wheelsets at a far lower cost of entry than carbon, they may have a winner on their hands.
Of course, the on-trail performance is what really matters, and we have an Enduro V3 wheelset headed our way for a longer-term test. Watch this space for how we get along with them.