They’re a big investment, when you factor that your 2-3 year old dirt bike may have a resale value in dirt form in the $4-5K range, if that. We get calls from guys all the time who say “well, I’m not really racing or nothing, so I’m just looking for the cheapest wheels you have to convert to Supermoto”. Well, the real reply there is that there really isn’t a cheap way to get into Supermoto unless you’re going to go Sportsman about it and ride on knobbies or some type of dual-sport tire. Yes, quality 17-inch supermoto wheels that will last are going to set you back between $900 and $1800 depending on how deep you’re going to go at this.
At Motostrano most of our wheels are built in-house by our master wheel builder, Paul Giani. We offer wheels where we lace new rims to your stock hubs, we offer Excel Rims laced to Talon Hubs and we offer tubeless set-ups alla cast aluminum wheels from Marchesini or spoked wheels via Alpina. All are made with the best, strongest and lightest aluminum rims and hubs and stainless steel. You won’t encounter rim bending, spoke or hub problems for many miles under normal heavy duty wear. We keep wheels in stock and can turn around most wheel orders in less than a week.
It should also be said, that over the course of the past five years, Motostrano has had the opportunity to handle, sell and test, virtually every type of supermoto wheel available. Being so involved in supermoto parts over this time, nothing has escaped us as far as testing and trying out. Our current catalog represents products that have withstood this test of time and endurance. We have learned alot about durability, availability, parts, construction, fit over the years, both from selling direct to consumers who’ve had problems with other products, as well as from racers who’ve given us direct feedback coming directly off the track- and we are talking feedback from both top world and national pro riders like Travis Marks (who also happens to be a salaried Honda Factory Test rider), Gerald Delepine, Micky Dymond and a host of others. It’s this knowledge that you the customer get to take advantage of when working with motostrano.
The benchmark wheelset is really the Excel rim laced to a Talon hub. Both Talon and Excel have been around for ages in motocross and flat track and set the standard for quality in the spoked MX wheel world. Both have years of experience in metal making and cutting and we’ve yet to see a failure in any of these products on the street or the track.
There are other brands of wheel out there, which we don’t recommend. There’s chinese knock-offs and there’s the cheaper stuff that the OEMs use for their street SM bikes. We don’t recommend them for your bike. Rims that are too soft and will bend, hubs that are too minimal or feature modular ‘universal’ adaptors to mount your rotors and sprocket. Over the years we’ve come to learn – some times the hard way – what works and what doesn’t and this experience has formulated the catalog you see at Motostrano today.
You can trim a few dollars off your supermoto conversion by going the OEM hub route, but then you sacrifice the ability to swap out your wheels and go dirt bike riding with one bike.
Tubeless wheels offer the performance enhancement of less weight (no tubes), longevity (no tube to pop) and better tire performance – less rubber in there means your tire heats up quicker.
The vast majority of wheels rolling out there use Excel rims on Talon hubs. This goes for street and for race.
The size of your wheels is determined by what kind of riding you do. If you are a budding racer and your bike is a dedicated supermoto race bike, you’ll want a 16.5×3.50 front rim and ideally a 5.00×17 rear rim. The 16.5 gives you noticeably quicker turning action and the fat rear gives you the most amount of contact patch at the rear wheel. Alpina also makes a 5.5 rear wheel that is used primarily on the Aprilia SXV supermoto. Once you go the 16.5 front route your only tire choice will be a supermoto slick tire.
For street duty, or for amateur racing, we’ll usually recommend a 17×3.50 front and a 4.25×17 rear. This will give you ample choice when it comes to tires and it also minimize any tire rubbing from the chain.
If properly made, your rear wheel shouldn’t cause significant chain rub on the tire. Correct offsetting will space out the rim away from the chain in most cases. A little tire rub is ok. A chain bashing your rim is not!
All of our standard wheelsets are built with stainless steel heavy duty spokes, either from Buchanan or Bull Dog.
Alpina has been turning heads lately with a tubeless supermoto wheel system that uses special washers to prevent air leakage without a tube.
Marchesini has been offering cast wheels for many years and supermoto wheels in the last five years. The Marchesinis are technically the lightest supermoto wheels available. Being cast, they tend to feel more stiff than a spoked wheel and are more difficult to service. I remember the first time I saw a set of Marchesini supermoto wheels five years ago. It was on a factory Vertemati race bike in Italy that was being used for testing purposes. It was very hush-hush at the time. They’ve since come to be known as one of the top wheels used by pro SM race teams in the US and Europe.
Although we wouldn’t recommend letting color direct your wheel choice, Motostrano does offer custom anodizing of both rims and hubs for an extra cost and wait. Motostrano offers a custom list of common colors and you can even dream up your own.
Our wheels are built to last. They’ve been tested over the largest Urban metal ramps the folks at All Access can dream up and they’ve been run on tens of thousands of miles of public roads and trails, over pot-holes and up and down concrete steps.
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