Miche Connect Wheels Review - BikeRadar

These tough wheels are tight and well-built, with smooth bearings and an excellent freehub. They’re on the heavy side, but that helps make them durable workhorses.

Miche makes dependable kit at good prices. The problem – up until now – is that some of the kit has tended to look a bit boring. A quick dip into the anodising bath has sorted out these new wheels a treat.

But they don’t just look pretty. Form blends well with function because the machined 7075 alloy hubs contain some very smooth bearings and an excellent freehub at the rear.

The bearings are good quality but easy to service and adjust thanks to a grub screw locking collar and the fact that you just use an Allen key in each end of the axle to pre-load them. This is also the easiest way to remove the axle assemblies both front and rear – handy since you have to do that to remove the spokes should you need to replace any.

Speaking of spokes, they’re stainless steel flat section in black, and out of the box they were pointing almost any direction other than forwards.

Fifteen minutes with the spoke key soon sorted this out, but it’s a shame we should have to do it at all. Having said that, it did mean we got to see just how tight, incredibly straight and well built the wheels are.

The rims are of single eyelet design, but at 26mm deep with a good thick wall, they are plenty stiff and strong. The rear is three-cross laced on the drive side with 16 spokes, and radial laced on the non-drive side with eight spokes.

The front is radial with 10 spokes per side. In use they feel as tough as they look, with a direct and precise ride, if a little on the weighty side. The machined braking surface bedded brake pads in quickly, and gave even and predictable braking.

The front weighed 886g and the rear 1124g. If they weighed a little less that would be great, but if you’re looking for a tough set of wheels and you like orange, you might just have found a pair of gems.

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