Forge+Bond Wheels

At my level of involvement in the bicycle industry, I am seldom functioning with complete information. I come at things with an interesting level of blissful ignorance in a sea of passionate knowledge. This particular story follows that pattern.

It starts with a conversation with Pete, where he gives me half of the information, most of it incorrect. The “wheels” portion of things was all good. So was the “new brand from CSS”. The dates were mostly correct, as was the state where things were taking place. Beyond that, I was flying blind.

From there, a few more e-mails were exchanged and a box showed up at my door. I opened it up and found a nice looking pair of carbon wheels. Then, a few days later I hopped in my vehicle, drove down to Bellingham and found out what the hell was going on.

Forge+Bond

The name is Forge+Bond, and there’s a deeper backstory than you would imagine as to what that name means and where it came from. But, this is North Shore Mountain Biking, not North Shore Marketing Aficionado, so let’s not worry too much about the mission statement, brand experience, identity and message. What I took away is that Forge+Bond is the house brand from the company (that is CSS) that has brought you Fusionfiber wheels from Revel, Evil, Chris King and a few others.

The focus of that company is carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic (I’m going to call it “thermoplastic carbon fiber” or “thermoplastic” from here. I haven’t made up my mind yet). We’ve heard a few times over the years about the wonders of thermoplastic carbon fiber over the traditional thermosets with which we are more familiar. I’ve got to admit that upon reading that pitch, I was a bit skeptical: “Fully recyclable”, “Less energy use”, “Automated and Made in the USA”. On the surface, these all feel like really good things, but we’ve been burned so many times by the bike industry blowing smoke up our asses, it becomes hard to take things at face value. It seemed like a good idea to meet some of the Forge+Bond crew and talk about these things in person.

Recyclability

Some of you will remember the recycling manifesto that I posted a month or two back. It was long and it was judgemental. It talked about lofty goals like manufacturers taking responsibility for their products from start to finish, and owning what they create from the cradle to the grave. Colour me shocked to hear the Forge+Bond crew using similar terminology. Unprompted!

That article also hinted at the challenges of carbon fiber and the lack of recycling options available for these products. Yes, we have heard the pitch for thermoplastics as “fully recyclable”, but this always felt like a bit of a far-out-there pipe dream. Where exactly am I going to take my fully recyclable bicycle frame for recycling once I’m done with it?

I see now that my thinking on this was a bit limited. We tend only to consider things as they are for us, not as they could be. Recycling is dropping a dozen beer cans in our blue bin after a long night of sadness and regret, for example. The system we’ve created is one of making something, buying something and then handing it over to somebody else to take care of it. When we talk about “recyclability” and carbon fiber, it isn’t really that.

For CSS and Fusionfiber, it starts in the factory. First and foremost, they claim to be a nearly zero waste facility. They’re taking all of their cutting room scraps and seconds and screw-ups, and they’re turning it into something else. This is sort of like a machine shop collecting all of their metal shavings, melting it down in the corner and turning it into a new billet. I’m not aware of too many other manufacturers turning their scraps into something else over in another corner of the building. Their goal is to bring every end-of-life rim back to the factory to get turned into something else once you’re done with it. The conversation starts with how that is possible.

Fusionfiber

Let’s all assume we have a rudimentary understanding of what goes into making a carbon fiber bike part. I don’t know if this is the industry standard way of making a wheel, but there are enough similar-looking videos for you to gain some understanding of how your thermoset carbon fiber rim is made. There are obviously different levels of refinement, but chances are good the typical wheel is some form of carbon fiber pre-preg “fabric” is laid up in a mold, the mold is cooked under heat and pressure, and out the back end spits your rim.

Unfortunately, many of the conversations with Forge+Bond ended with “if only you could see it, you’d totally understand!” or “it’s so cool, we just can’t show you!” At this point, fully buying into the Forge+Bond program requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but the nuts and bolts are:

- The fibers are largely the same as what you’d get in many other thermoset carbon fibers.

- The matrix is the difference. Where a thermoset uses some form of epoxy, the Forge+Bond thermoplastic uses a form of nylon.

- Fusionfiber is the proprietary use of standard, off-the-shelf thermoplastic material. What’s proprietary is how it’s put together, and the specific combination of heat, time and pressure – Forge+Bond advised that their patent was a good place to start if you really wanted to understand things. I tried but didn’t get very far.

- The cost of entry into thermoplastic is higher than that of thermosets as it requires a certain amount of automation.

What Forge+Bond claims to have is a competitive advantage over other wheels, partially down to the material itself, and partially down to how they work with it. So understanding their product requires a bit of understanding of these two things.

As mentioned above, a typical thermoset rim is laid up and cured in a one-step process. The epoxy holding it all together hardens through a chemical reaction. There’s no re-forming once your product is set, and you need to burn or chemically strip away the matrix if you wish to recycle the fibers.

With thermoplastic carbon fiber, there’s no irreversible chemical reaction taking place during curing. Instead, the material is heated up to a high temperature and more-or-less melts into the shape of the mold. This property allows you to form it, and re-form it again. To recycle it, there is no need to strip away the matrix, you can just chip up the material, put that in a mold, cook it up and Bob’s your uncle.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. By chipping the material up, you’re left with a bunch of short little fibers, far from ideal for turning into another rim. But for other parts, this material is more than okay. CSS has even gone so far as to create a sister company to start to turn this material into other useful products. More projects are hinted at, but for now, the sole cycling-related product is a tire lever. A thermoplastic carbon fiber tire lever might sound like a bit of a joke, but after breaking several cheap plastic levers over the weekend trying to get a DH tire onto a rim, I’m not so sure that it is. The finished lever has all the properties you want from a plastic lever (light and non-marking) with all of those you’d want in a metal lever (strong as all hell and stiff as a board). Holding that thing in my hand it felt like it wouldn’t even think of bending and I had dreams about what I would do with those bad boys if they were in my possession.

Manufacturing

Beyond ease of recycling, thermoplastic carbon fiber has other differences. A major one is that the material in its raw form is different than that of a thermoset. Again, without seeing how this works, it’s hard to imagine what is going on, but what I understood is that at room temperature thermoplastics are not as pliable as thermosets, and require a fair amount of heat before they can become workable. Hand-laying soft fabric into a mold isn’t an option. New ways of manufacturing a wheel are required.

The way I think of it is manufacturing by sub-assembly, rather than a one-step process. A Forge+Bond wheel comes together as three large pieces. You have each sidewall, and the center rim bed formed as a separate piece before being brought together as a wheel. The final assembly of the wheel is probably the closest approximation to building a thermoset wheel (according to Forge+Bond, of course…but they alluded to a mold and a bladder). The three pieces fuse together (or “bond”, as it were) under heat and pressure, no additional glues or resins are required. The largest difference is how you construct those three pieces. Forge+Bond likened the making of each of those pieces to stamping or (wait for it) forging (aha!). They claim greater compaction due to this process. And you can sort of see it. Stamping out a relatively flat piece of carbon fiber is going to be easier than forming a complex 3-dimensional structure. Time will tell if this makes a better wheel.

Forge+Bond also claims that thermoplastics are a better riding material, not just a better manufacturing material. Again, I don’t have any details but the suggestion is that the material properties of the matrix add a degree of vibration damping and flexibility to their rim. They also point out that their material has no expiration date and doesn’t require refrigerated storage, further eliminating waste and energy consumption in manufacturing.

The Wheel itself

So that’s how they make it and what they make it with. What about the wheel itself? Well, what you have here is the Forge+Bond "30 EM 29” wheel. They’re suggesting this is perfect for “enduro and aggressive trail riders”. The goal was strength and performance, not necessarily light weight.

The rim itself is constructed with Forge+Bonds “NXS” technology. This refers to the facets that you see on the rim and places more material where you need it (at the spoke hole) and less where you don’t. This seems to be one of the primary differentiators between the Forge+Bond rim and the ones they are making for third parties.

Ignoring the rim, the wheel starts with Industry Nine Hydra hubs, 28 holes front and rear (32 hole is available). It uses Sapim D-Light spokes and mates with the rim to create a (by my measurement) 886-gram front wheel and a 1,058-gram rear wheel (incl. rim strip and valve). From this, there are a few things to note:

- Hubs – pretty standard stuff. Forge+Bond indicates more options to come but wanted something solid and predictable to launch with - more options will follow.

- 28 spokes is a number I’m not used to seeing in a rear wheel.

- 2.0/1.65/2.0 Sapim D-Light spokes are on the lighter side of things, as well.

- Dimensions are given as 38mm external and 30mm internal, for a recommended tire range of 2.3” to 2.6”.

- MSRP is 2,599 USD.

- There’s also a gravel wheel available now, and additional models of mountain bike wheels are on the way soon.

- Right now, you can buy direct from Forge+Bond in Canada and the US, with dealer and distributor arrangements worldwide coming in the near future.

Above, we mentioned warranty as the means Forge+Bond is using to reclaim material. One would expect that it would need to be a fairly thorough warranty in order to entice people to ship their broken wheels back to the factory. And it seems like it is! There’s a lifetime warranty on defects in material and workmanship, as well as a secondary warranty to cover ride-related breakages (which, if I’m reading it correctly is the same as the defect warranty but just requires you to pick up the tab on shipping). Secondary owners are even covered under the crash replacement program and will receive a discount on a new rim.

Setup

Setup was smooth-ish. The first thing I did after taking the wheels out of the box was put my tensionmeter to them. I don’t necessarily trust the absolute numbers that gauge spits out (it seems to change with temperature, for example) but it does spit out repeatable numbers that allow for comparison of relative spoke tension. The Forge+Bond wheels came with an acceptable degree of difference in spoke tension, but I spent 20-30 minutes tweaking things by a quarter turn here and there, just because. We’ll see how tension looks in a month or so.

Slapping a used Maxxis EXO+ on was a tool-free affair, and it pumped right up with a hand pump, no problem. The front tire…well…let’s just say I got to know just how easy a used Maxxis EXO+ tire slides on and off these rims. The first time around, I blame Forge+Bond. I got the tire mounted but things were not sealing well enough to pop the bead. I pulled out the fire extinguisher 3000, and that was just enough to get the bead popped, but air was flowing everywhere. Feeling lazy, I threw some sealant in there to see what would happen. Bad things happened. The spokes were spittin’ rhymes like A Tribe Called Quest on the Subway. If rhymes were sealant. And not to sidetrack…but now would be a pretty good time to check out the video for Electric Relaxation.

Feeling doubly smart, I decided to do the old tube in the tubeless trick to see if I could force a better seal on the rim strip. I did that, put things together again and it was worse! That one was my fault. I think I put too much pressure in the tube which proceeded to decimate the rim strip at each and every spoke hole (too much pressure forced the rim strip too far into the hole, stretching and tearing the shit out of everything). So, after a quick trip to West Point (shout out to their $7 rim taping deal!) I was good to go.

Riding

As mentioned above, Forge+Bond suggested they had built a forgiving wheel that wouldn’t suffer from excessive radial stiffness or harshness. Moving from the stock aluminum wheels on my Ibis I haven’t felt a huge change in how my bike rides. Weights are similar, so I didn’t notice much change in how quickly my bike rolled or pedaled. Ride quality hasn’t felt all that different, either. Most of my riding so far has been on the janky and rough side of things, and I certainly haven’t experienced anything that would contradict Forge+Bond's claims of a forgivable ride. I’ll have to do some back-to-back testing on my go to trails to see if I can pick up on specific differences in ride quality. I suspect that the biggest difference for me is going to be the fact that these wheels don’t look like a dinged up mess a year from now.

In Conclusion

A 2600 USD set of mountain bike wheels speaks to a limited portion of our sport. This is a lot of money for something that is available for less from other brands. Heck, you can even get CSS-produced thermoplastic carbon fiber wheels from third parties for less money! Price aside, Forge+Bond offers a compelling narrative and something different. Made-in-North-America-zero-waste-carbon-fiber is a great thing and it makes sense that might command a premium at this point in time. At some point during my day with Forge+Bond another journalist asked/stated “It sounds like you’re selling a manufacturing process more than anything?” Those present were quick to tout the performance advantages of their wheel, but I actually think this statement is fairly close to reality. Turning factory scraps and warranty returns into another product is exciting! I’m super curious to see how this technology develops and where this goes in the future. For now, I’ll continue to ride these wheels and I’ll check back in at some point in the nearish future.