The folks at Crank Brothers have been very, very busy over the last year. How busy? Try this: they’ve added wheels, headsets, integrated cranks, a new take on the quick-release skewer…and oh yeah, they’ve also taken over production and distribution of the Speedball adjustable seatpost from Maverick, and they’re looking to boost production of the automated saddle dropper several fold.

So things are a little hectic in the company’s Laguna Beach H.Q., where everyone’s doing the customary pre-Interbike trade show shuffle before they officially debut the new product to the U.S. market, media and retailers.

Wheels.

Start off with a tubeless rim extrusion that, if you take a cross section of it, will reveal an I-beam running vertically down its center. The vertical structure within the rim profile is possible because spoke heads never actually breach the rim cavity. In fact, there are no holes in any aspect of the rim profile, save for the valve stem, making for a stiff rim and easy tubeless setup.

Instead of traditional construction, Crank Brothers new wheels feature a rib of aluminum on the interior diameter of the rim that is drilled out for 12 separate cylindrical steel spoke shuttles, each of which, in turn, is drilled for two short stainless steel spokes.

The paired spoke segments then thread into long milled aluminum nipples that have standard-sized wrench flats cut into them. The heads of the direct-pull nipples fit into recessed carriers in the hub, where they swivel onto thin bushings.

Sound confusing? It could be, but it’s just another way to skin a cat. The hubs are new, too, and each rear wheel has six pawls, three of which engage every 7-or-so degrees of rotation. The only real difference between the cross-country and all-mountain wheelsets is the width of the rim, and weights for the cross-country wheels are somewhere in the 1550- to 1600-gram ballpark.

Crank Brother's new wheels feature uniques design elements from the rim to the hub