“…for anyone looking for long-lasting gravity wheels that are tough on trails and easy on the wallet, the Massif DHs are worth a look.”

“We rode them on steep, fast and rugged shuttle runs in Squamish, and they attacked our test track like marauding Sherman tanks blasting through the Ardennes.” (um…that’s good, right?)

“These approrpiately named wheels sport “massifly” broad 32-millimeter wide rims, which allowed the tire profile to spread out nicely.”

“From the first ride, there was no doubt as to what these wheels were intended to do: obliterate rough terrain.”

We couldn’t find a copy of the review on  the Bike magazine site, but a full-sized scan of the piece is available here.  (You can also just click on the image at right.)

Cole designed the Massif DH for riders who need the toughest, gnarliest, most bomb-proofest wheels available. Sounds like the Bike editors agree. We think you will too. You can buy our wheels from your local retailer of online from our friends at Cantitoe Road.

You can also learn more about the Massif DH on the Cole North America website.

The team presented its 2010 squad (and equipment) last Sunday (Valentine’s Day, for most of us)  with a  low- key affair focused on its regional roots. Festivities included a religious ceremony at the impressive Catedral del Lugo (built in 1129) , a  team ride with 200 of the young locals, and a formal presentation of the squad by President of the Xunta de Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijoo plus assorted dignitaries. (When your team is sponsored by an autonomous community in the far north of Spain rather than by big commercial sponsors, you do things a little differently.)

The squad handily won the teams classification at last year’s Vuelta a España, with captain Ezequiel Mosquera finishing  fifth place in GC.  The team had also ridden the Giro d’Italia  that season— its first Grand Tour appearance ever— and are hoping for more Grand Tour invitations for 2010.

Check the Xacobeo Galicia page for more more info and  and lots of photos. (It’s in Spanish, but easy to navigate) .

Well, we figured Richard knows a thing or two about workmanship, ATMO, so we checked ‘em out.

Holy Moley, these are some gorgeous bikes. Not because they’ve got fancy cut-outs or clever decorative touches (not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you).  And no, smartypants, not even because this one’s got Cole wheels on it.

The Gaulzetti Cicli Corsa shown here is beautiful in the same way as a perfectly designed machine tool or a premiere bench-made knife: its utter lack of pretension is precisely what makes it so awe-inspiring.

Plus, in the world of Handbuilt Bike Show display pieces (not, as we said, that there’s anything wrong with that kind of work either), it’s just plain refreshing to get an occasional glimpse deep into the heart of our sport’s working-class roots. And it feels good to see this level of craftsmanship brought to the world of straight-ahead racing frames meant to collect dings and dents and get all scratched-up and filthy; frames meant to be ridden at redline day after day, season after season.

Turns out Craig Gaulzetti cut his racing teeth on the Belgian pro kermesse circuit. Why are we not surprised? His frames are every bit as tough and hard and intense as a one-hour-plus-one-lap worship service at the Cathedral of Pain. And, at $2,500 for the Deda AL frameset, just as uncompromising.

Want to impress your buddies at the legal firm on the Saturday morning ride? Forget it. They won’t even understand what they’re looking at. On the other hand, if you merely want to beat them to whimpering jelly in as efficient,  professional, and thoroughly workmanlike manner as possible, well,  Gaulzetti Cicli may have just the hammer you’ve been looking  for.

Or as Justin says, Vi presento la Gaulzetti Ciclci Corsa per ATMO-issimo. Divertirti!

We’re proud to have our Cole wheels under the men and women of the Richard Sachs Cyclocross Team, including some very special prototype builds of theT38 (cousin to the T50 that VeloNews liked so much back in August) and T24 wheelsets (in some of the photos, they’re so new they don’t even have their decals yet).

In addition to being very fun and great racing, ‘cross is an incredible proving ground for wheel strength and reliability: a single race will subject wheels and hubs to as much gumbo mud, stress, pounding, and miscellaneous abuse as a whole season of road racing or XCMTB.

The team’s doing quite well this fall, including ace rider Dan Timmerman taking first in the pro event at the UCI C2 in Vermont. And, yes, the wheels are performing flawlessly.

Follow the team’s adventures on Richard’s exhaustive blog, Richard Sachs ‘Cross Reference.  So, Pookums, Amy (with no “w”), Dan, Josh, and Will (and Richie), this one’s for you. And as Richard likes to say, Cross does kcufign rule atmo! (whatever that means).

Photos above (and many, many more besides) from the Richard Sachs Flickr feed.

This set courtesy of (and copyright by) MLK Images (thanks, Michael!). Highly recommended. Click here for hundreds more.

PS: We’re also pleased to announce that Cole wheels will be available on selected Richard Sachs models in 2010.

Zack Vestal gave Cole carbon C50 clinchers a nice write-up back in August

With its C-50 Lite wheelset, Cole Products takes a unique approach to the carbon-clincher challenge by moving the brake track down the sidewall, away from the tire and toward the spokes. This allows the interior clincher tire bed to help support the brake track while helping dissipate heat by increasing the surface area across which braking heat migrates.

This, combined with some other novel design features, makes the C-50 Lite wheelset an attractive option in a crowded field of carbon wheels.

Wow, nice. One good thing about a VeloNews review, those guys really get into the details, right down to the cold-forging on the Cole hub body and touches like our hollow titanium QR skewers.

Overall, Zack seems to like the C50s, saying (and again, these are our bolds, not Zack’s)

The Cole C-50 wheels strike me as great, all-around, all-carbon clinchers. If I had one bike and needed one do-everything wheelset that married light, stiff, strong and aero, I would put these on my short list. The C-50s are equally at home in the lunch-ride sprint or on the final climb of a six-hour mountain marathon.

Read the complete article here.

One point Zack makes that’s worth mentioning here is that while the likes that fact that relocating the brake track farther down the 5C50 rim allows us to build a stonger carbon clincher wheel, and that readjusting your brake pads is easy enough, he’s less enthusiastic about the fact that it makes it more difficult to take replacement wheels from neutral support in races (our recommended solution, of course is to buy many, many sets of C50 wheels).

Learn more about C50 wheels here.

It’s an amazing feeling

First up, Fuji sprint ace Borut Bozic delivered the first-ever Cole Grand Tour win in Stage 6. Going early at 250m, the crafty Slovenian left the bunch in disarray, easily outlasting Garmin-Slipstream’s Tyler Farrar and the rest of the chasers to the finish line.

Then came the icing on the Fuji-Servetto cake: team leader Juanjo Cobo, who grabbed the honors in the final mountain stage, battling rainy weather in the grueling Madrilian Sierra in a 179-km route from Ávila to La Granja and a top-10 finish in the Vuelta GC.

Our man Daniel Sánchez reports while travelling with the team: “The Cantabrian launched his first attack in the last slope of the climb, but waited for his real moment to go on a massive attack with three kilometers remaining to give our boys the year’s biggest moment of glory. Cobo had earlier grabbed the flowers in the queen stage of the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon, and marks the fourth Pro Tour overall by Fuji-Servetto.”

So here’s what’s in the Cole trophy case after just the first year: four Pro Tour victories; two Grand Tour victories; a Grand Tour Top Ten and a Grand Tour Team Top Five.

Thanks again to Daniél and all our friends at Fuji-Servetto for delivering the goods with an incredible premiere season. Can’t wait for 2010!

Next up? Well, there’s always The Worlds, and with riders like these, as the Europeans say, “perhaps we can hope for a good result.

Cole Wheels North America

The Cole brand has been existence since 2001, enjoying success in Europe and Asia on the Pro Tour and World Cup circuits, but is only now becoming widely available in the USA and Canada.

So let’s get to the point where the rubber, so to speak, meets the road: what makes Cole any different—and possibly better– than any number of other fine lightweight, handbuilt wheelsets?

We’ll devote some space here in the future to outlining the various Cole technologies and the how and why of how they work so well, but for the time being, let’s stick to two key items:

1: Patented DSA (Dynamic Spoke Alignment) technology means we can use straight-pull (as opposed to traditional J-bend) spokes with complete independence of the rim and hub elements (unlike other straight-pull designs), so there are no linear or lateral stresses at either end of the spoke. This means that Cole wheels can be built at higher, more uniform tension, so that

2: The rider gets a significantly stiffer, stronger, more durable wheel for a given weight. Which means a crisper-accelerating, longer-lasting wheel with zero weight penalty.

Want more? Download a PDF copy (8Mb) of the Cole Wheels 2010 Catalog.

Staying in touch with the latest from Cole:

Our product site, colewheels.com. Coming soon (we’re loading in all the content and tech spec)

This blog, updated about every other week.

Twitter: @Cole_Wheels (not to be confused with @colewheels without the underscore; they’re the French distributor) . The best up-to-the-nanosecond news, race updates, links, tech notes, product information, and reviews…plus general gossip and assorted dirt-dishery.

Facebook. The Cole Wheels Facebook page, with most of our blog and additional pics & video for those who prefer the Facebook interface.

Our Flickr stream. More photos, videos and miscellaneous miscellanea than you can shake a quick release at. This is an ongoing project; we’ll announce additions as they occur.

YouTube. Coming soon (we’ll have video from the Interbike show, so starting late September)

Our RSS feeds, as follows:

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Email. Product questions/purchases or dealer requests? Leave a Comment here on the blog or contact our helpful staff at info (at) colewheels.com.

Monthly (Email) Newsletter: For those for whom the firehoses above are too much to drink from, here’s a monthly digest, delivered right  to your Inbox. (First issue October ’09, delivered late September.) Just drop us your email address at newsletter (at) colewheels.com.