HED Eroica LT Disc Brake 650b Tubeless Wheelset

The HED Eroica LT Disc Brake 650b Tubeless Wheelset is built for gravel riding where durability matters as much as speed. HED designed this alloy wheelset around a 650b platform for riders running wider tires on rough, mixed-surface terrain, and it shows in a handful of details most road-oriented wheels skip entirely.

The rim is a 6061 aluminum alloy, tubeless-ready clincher built disc-only, with a 25mm internal width and 30mm external width that gives wider gravel tires proper support without ballooning the sidewall shape. What sets it apart is HED's reinforced rim bead, sometimes called a "Fat Lip" design, which adds extra material right where a rim takes the most abuse — the outer edge that catches a rock or root when a tire bottoms out under a hard hit. That same extra material also acts as a bearing surface that helps a tubeless tire seat and seal cleanly, so the wheel holds air at low pressure using standard rim tape rather than requiring a specialized bead-lock setup.

HED laces the rim with 24 round steel J-bend spokes per wheel in a 2-cross pattern, and the spoke holes are angled into the rim rather than drilled straight through. That node angle lets each spoke pull more directly in line with the load it's actually carrying, spreading tension more evenly across push, pull, and side-to-side forces instead of concentrating stress at a few points. In practice, that means a wheel that holds true longer under the repeated impacts gravel riding puts into a rim, rather than needing constant re-tensioning.

Power and braking run through HED's own 545 aluminum hubs, built with a 12x100mm front axle and 12x142mm rear, and a Centerlock interface for rotor mounting. The hub internals use high-grade stainless bearings aimed at keeping rolling resistance low over the life of the wheel rather than just out of the box, paired with a pawl-based freehub engagement system that keeps power transfer responsive when a rider needs to get back on the pedals quickly after a technical section.

At a claimed 740 grams for the front wheel and 860 grams for the rear, the set comes in at roughly 1,600 grams — not the lightest wheelset in gravel racing, but a reasonable tradeoff for the added rim durability and bead protection built into the design. That balance is really the point of the Eroica LT: it's not chasing the lowest weight number on a spec sheet, it's built for a rider who wants a wheelset that can take a hit on a rocky descent or a rutted farm road and keep rolling true. At $599.99, it's a durable, tubeless-ready option for gravel racing and varied-terrain riding without the fragility that sometimes comes with the lightest carbon options in this category.