cleaning, and a lesson about wheels

today i finally got around to cleaning the cross bike from last weekend's muddy hell. there was mud everywhere. it took a couple hours, but now its reasonalbly clean. i do have some bad news to report, however. while cleaning and inspecting the bike, i noticed a small crack in the rear rim on the braking surface. shitty. i hit some rocks and roots pretty hard durnig the race, and with the extremely low psi in the tires, they must have impacted the rim and cracked it. the crack seems pretty superfical, and i think the structural integrity of the rim is unharmed. to add insult to injury the tire easily peeled away from the rim, meaning i need to reglue it. it gives me an excuse to further examine the crack though. i should have rolled the tire during the race by how easily i was able to remove it. for the last couple hours i've been weighing the pros and cons of actually using carbon rimmed wheels for cross.
Pros: light, strong, stiff, cut through the mud due to the aero profile, sexy
Cons: expensive!
i figure carbon has many times the impact resistance of aluminum, so a regular aluminum tubular rim would have been trashed as a result of the impact, where carbon is resilient enough to absorb some of the energy from the impact. if i was using clinchers, the rim would have been done for sure due to the rim's need for a "bead lock" (weak thin-walled sides.) here are some pics to better visualize. the first picture is of a normal clincher rim cross-section, the second pic is a tubular rim cross-section. notice the increased hight of the sidewalls of the clincher rim.


tubular is definately the way to go for cyclocross, due to the infrequency of pinch-flats, and the ability to run really, really low pressure for better traction. the use of carbon tubulars is still up in the air though. i don't think i'd be using them if i didn't get a screaming deal on them from ebay. they work awesome and look pimp, i just wonder if the rim would be damaged at all if i had aluminum tubulars instead. the world will never know. if they die prematurely, i'll probably get some ksyrium tubulars next fall to replace them. i need to go prep the rim for gluing.
-brooks