Why we use Mach1 rims

We assemble 170,000 wheels a year. At that rate you do not pick a supplier from a catalogue: you need someone who can say, without hesitating, what their rim will carry, on which test rig they proved it, and how many they will have in stock next Thursday. A manufacturer — a French one — who designs and drills their own rims, and whom you can ask a design question without going through a salesperson. There are not many. Building something solid with Mach1 went without saying.

× Since 1903 Since 1937

Mach1 designs and manufactures the rims and the spokes; Velox builds them into wheels, around hubs and components we choose, to your specification and through constant dialogue — real advisory work, not order-taking. That is the Velox expertise no other wheelbuilder can offer you!

A manufacturer, not a distributor

Mach1 was born in 1937 in the Saint-Étienne area, under the name Rayons Bernard, making spokes and nipples. The French plant, at Marclopt in the Loire, is still in production — and the rims we build carry “Made in France” on their data sheet.

The difference from an importer comes down to one sentence: when we ask a question about a rim — an unusual drilling, a load, an ERD — the answer comes from the people who drew it and who drill it, not from a catalogue.

A year to draw a rim

A rim is not an extrusion bent into a circle. Its section, the thickness of each wall, the shape of the bridge, the position of the holes: every dimension bears on stiffness, on weight and on fatigue life, and none of them is decided alone. Developing a new model calls on computer-aided design, simulation of component behaviour, 3D printing, full prototyping, dynamic testing and the design of dedicated tooling. It takes close to a year.

The test rig, and why it matters

A load rating only means something if somebody has measured it. Mach1 has its own rig and runs several families of test on it:

• Vertical and horizontal bending, on the bare rim and on the built wheel: this is what produces the loads published on our rim sheets.
• Pull-out and nipple tear-out. The weak point of a wheel is almost never the spoke: it is where the spoke pulls on the rim.
• Rolling. Tens of thousands of revolutions under load, because a rim fails in fatigue, not all at once.

How a rim is made, in eight steps

The process is the same for every aluminium J-bend rim on the market. What varies from one maker to another is how consistently it is held — and that consistency is what you find, or fail to find, at the moment of bringing a wheel up to tension.

1. Profile Aluminium bars arrive, one section per rim: internal shape, finish and final diameter all follow from it.
2. Bending The bar is wound into two to four coils, with tooling specific to each rim.
3. Sawing The coils are cut to give open rims. It is this cut that fixes the final diameter.
4. Sleeving The rim is closed under pressure, on a sleeve or on two pins depending on the model.
5. Drilling Spoke holes and valve hole, drilled automatically: number, diameter and position to order.
6. Eyeleting Optional: an eyelet, single or double, spreads the spoke load over the wall instead of concentrating it on the hole.
7. Machining Optional, for rim brakes: the sidewalls are machined to give brake tracks that are genuinely flat.
8. Marking and inspection Cleaning, decals or engraving, then a final visual check, piece by piece, by the operator.

Profile Bending Sleeving Drilling Machining Marking and inspection

What it changes for your wheel

Everything above translates, for us, into four very concrete things:

• Published figures. Axle load and system weight, use by use. That is what fills the load table on our rim sheets — and what lets us turn a build down rather than attempt it.
• A reliable ERD. Published for every model and every diameter, so the spoke length comes out right first time, without measuring the rim.
• Eleven thousand part numbers. The right diameter in the right drilling and the right colour, including 16, 20 and 24 inch — the sizes almost nobody stocks.
• A technical contact. For unusual builds — heavy cargo, hub motor, asymmetric drilling — the question goes to the engineering department and comes back as a recommendation, not an opinion.

The three remaining rims in our selector are Ryde, a Dutch manufacturer, for two heavily loaded profiles Mach1 does not cover. The criterion is the same: we only build with rims whose maker stands behind its figures.

The manufacturing and testing data on this page come from the “Conception et développement” and “Savoir-faire industriel” pages of Mach1, reused and reset with their agreement. The workshop commentary is ours.