It feels like a life ago, but I first came across Jon Partington in a dimly lit corner of the Handmade Bicycle Show Australia. It was 2019, and there sat prototype samples of a unique boomerang-like carbon fibre spoke design as the centrepiece to a 1,150 gram road wheelset that held ambitions of being as desirable to disc-brake bikes as Lightweight’s once were to rim brake bikes.
Situated next door to the CarbonNexus hub of Deakin University (a shared collaborator of Carbon Revolution, creators of leading carbon car racing wheels), it would be another couple of years before Partington would have those feathery wheels on dreamy show bikes and under a few hundred customers, many of whom could afford to ride whatever they could dream of.
Fast forward to 2023 and the boutique manufacturer from Geelong, Victoria, has now released a second iteration of its wheels – the MKII R39/44. I’ve had these highly stiff and lowly massed carbon-spoked wheels bolted into a handful of different road bikes over the past couple of months, and while they’re unquestionably an incredible product, as you’ll find out, only a select group are likely ever to experience them.
This in-depth review looks at the tech (for which there is plenty), asks (and answers) some candid questions, and provides some back-to-back ride testing.
Good stuff: Impressively stiff and light but not harsh, easy and non-restricted tyre fitment, smooth rolling hubs, ride warranty, classy aesthetics.
Bad stuff: Top-tier pricing, proprietary everything with limited wheel repairability, wide spokes make the wheel feel deeper in high gust conditions, sharp spokes require care when handling, no aero data.
The specs
Partington is a small company (currently) with a single product for sale – the MKII R39/44. Built for racing and/or daily use, it’s a disc-brake-specific, tubeless-ready road wheel with a 39 mm depth front rim and a deeper 44 mm rim out back.
Both front and rear rims share the same 21 mm internal width with hooks for keeping tubeless or tubed clincher tyres in place. Externally, the tightly radiused U-shaped rims measure 28 mm at the widest point (at the tyre bead). A rim of this internal width is ideally suited to 25-32 mm tyres, but it can handle wider, too.
The rim beds are solid with no spoke holes to cover (yay for trouble-free tubeless!). The closed design sees Partington mould its carbon rims around a solid (machined to shape) foam core that remains in place. It’s a method that’s closely comparable to how Corima, Lightweight, and Mavic’s Cosmic Ultimate wheels are produced, and it helps to ensure tight/even compaction of the carbon while providing a further structural element.
Bonded into the rims are Partington’s true signature piece, its boomerang-like spoke design. Each moulded carbon fibre spoke is effectively two spokes, following a straight line from the rim, wrapping around the unique hybrid aluminium and carbon fibre hub shell, and then continuing on another straight path to a different point on the rim.
According to founder Jon Partington, spokes are a perfect application for using carbon fibre as they’re under tension. “The challenge is really at the junction, so the spokes at the rim or the spokes connecting to the hub," he said. "The idea by the spoke-to-hub joint is that instead of trying to terminate the end of a spoke and anchor it there, we rather just keep the loads in tension, wrap it around the hub, and then back to the rim. That way, you’re only fighting the bonding challenge at the rim.” It’s a concept that’s loosely shared by others, such as Lightweight, although the specific execution is noticeably different.
“The way we manufacture them is proprietary to us, and the spokes as they exist in the wheel are as they’re moulded with no further sanding or paint," Partington said. "One of the opportunities in the process we use is with Towpreg. Towpreg is a bundle of [carbon fibre] filaments already impregnated with resin, we gather several of these bundles, create a preform, and then mould it. And because we don’t do any post-mould finishing, each of these thousands of carbon filament remains preserved from end to end, so we get a really consistent product in terms of stiffness and strength.”
The rims, the centre of the hubshells, and the matching carbon spokes are manufactured in Partington’s own Geelong-based facility. New for the MKII, those spokes now wrap around Partington’s own hubs, with the centre of the hub being moulded carbon bonded to aluminium pieces (which are machined and finished by producers in nearby Melbourne). The wheels are only available to fit now ubiquitous 142x12 and 100x12 frames, with freehub bodies available for Shimano (HG11) and SRAM (XDR) groupsets, with Campagnolo (N3W) currently in the works. I’ll come back to these hubs.
As we’ve seen from numerous manufacturers in the past, using carbon fibre in this application aims to achieve a significantly stiffer wheel at a lower weight. And lower weight these are, which also lends itself to a claim of class-leading stiffness to weight. My test sample wheels weighed 543 (front) and 622 (rear) grams, without the provided aluminium tubeless valves or disc rotor lockrings, but with the heavier Shimano HG11 freehub body (SRAM XDR freehubs are a few grams lighter). That’s a paired weight of 1,165, five grams more than claimed weight.
How Partington stack up to other roughly similar depth and clincher/tubeless wheels (note, not all weights are verified. Prices are from the time of publishing.):
| Wheel | Rim Depth | Internal Rim Width | Weight | Price |
| Extralite Cyberdisc 338CS (Berd spokes) | 38 mm | 18 mm | 1,005 g | Approx US$3,500 |
| Princeton Carbon Alta 3532 | 32-35 mm | 21 mm | from 1,094 g | US$3,995 |
| Partington MKII R39/44 | 39 mm F/ 44 mm R | 21 mm | 1,165 g | US$6,400 |
| Syncros Capital SL | 40 mm | 25 mm hookless | 1,170 g | US$4,200 |
| Lightweight Obermayer Evo | 48 mm | 18.2 mm | 1,230 g | US$8,695 |
| FarSports Evo 4 | 45 mm | 19 mm | 1,230 g | US$2,400 |
| Campagnolo Hyperon Ultra | 37 mm | 21 mm | 1,240 g | US$4,100 |
| Zipp 353 NSW | 45 mm | 25 mm hookless | 1,255 g | US$4,220 |
| Mavic Cosmic Ultimate 45 Disc | 45 mm | 19 mm | 1,255 g | Approx US$4,600 |
| Roval Alpinist CLX II | 33 mm | 21 mm | 1,265 g | US$2,650 |
| DT Swiss PRC 1100 Mon Chasseral | 24 mm | 18 mm | 1,266 g | US$3,733 |
| Cadex 36 Disc | 36 mm | 22.4 mm hookless | 1,287 g | US$3,200 |
Partington may not be outright winning the weight wars, but consider rim widths, rim depths, and validated testing, and the Partingtons and its nearest big-name competitors are rather impressive. Meanwhile, Partington has teased that a shallower depth and 100 gram-lighter version of its wheels are near completion.
Whether we admit it or not, aesthetics play a large role in any premium purchase. I feel that Partington holds an advantage here with an understated look that lets the technology (the spokes) be the definitive visual feature. The rims are painted matte black, the carbon spokes and centres of the hub shells are left raw from the moulds, while aluminium portions of the hubs are given an anodised finish with laser-etched logos. It’s looked great on any bike I’ve equipped them to.
Now I get to the part that will surely turn away a large number of you – a pair of Partington MKII R39/44 retails for the following:
- US$6,400, excluding tax
- AU$9,900, including GST
- €6,000, excluding tax
- £5,400 including VAT
Yep, these are big figures that will only appeal to a select group. And yes, there is a market for such things, especially given that in many regions a pair of Lightweight Obermayer Evos costs more again (almost 25% more in Australia).
Such pricing may have you assuming you also get the world’s fanciest wheel bags, a coffee table book, and perhaps some cool branded toolkit. Rather, Partington focuses on the wheels and only includes a pair of nice-quality aluminium tubeless valves, aluminium centerlock lockrings, and a couple of branded cotton bags in place of bubble wrap or the like. That’s it. There’s no extra waste in shipping these wheels, but equally, no added bonuses.
There’s no denying that such pricing makes the Syncros Capital SL and Cadex 36 Disc look like a screaming deal at approximately half the price, and surely Taiwan manufacturing efficiencies help there while Australian labour rates don’t. Regardless of whether they’re worth more than the insured value of my car (they are), what matters to those who have the means to buy them is whether they do what they claim and how well they do it. I’ll get to that, but first, let’s look at some finer details.
Solving first-iteration issues
Fundamentally Partington’s new MKII isn’t a huge departure from the MKI. The carbon rims and unique spoke design are effectively the same. Likewise, the way Partington tensions and then bonds its wheels in a fixture (a process about which it’s real hush-hush) hasn’t changed. Things differ with a new in-house hub design and a new resin formula for bonding the spokes into place.
Did we do a good job with this story?
