Salsa Cycles introduced the Gordo rim at the 2007 Interbike show. Now after several minor design tweaks, it is ready for the trails in your locality. The Gordo is a 35mm wide rim that promises to give your treads a wider footprint, but not only that, it has several other features that should make the Gordo a popular rim amongst 29″er freaks everywhere.

The Gordo isn’t just a rim design made wider to fit 29″er tires. It is a new design made from the ground up as a 29″er specific rim. Optimized to work with the idiosyncracies of 29″er rubber, the Gordo caused the product engineering team for Salsa to rethink how a rim and tire interface with each other.

Using Finite Element Analysis and healthy doses of trigonometry and physics, Salsa found that a tire mounts and sits on a rim bead very differently than 26 inch tires, or narrower 700c tires. Using this information allowed Salsa to design a rim well and bead seat that not only interfaces with a 29″er tire better, it also makes the rim and tire a safer combination to ride off road.

As you can see from the photo above, the Gordo has a bead seat that is a bit different than your average 29″er rim. The bead has an actual “groove” to capture the tire’s bead when inflated. This feature keeps the tire from coming off the rim bead seat when running lower pressures. In fact, I have heard from riders on prototype Gordo rims that they could run “rediculously low” pressures with this design. (Note: Salsa Cycles does not recommend the Gordo be used tubeless. There is a warning sticker surrounding the valve stem hole that reads “Do not use with tubeless systems”.)

The other benefit of the Gordo’s rim bead seat design is that if a rider flats, the tire is retained on the rim, and doesn’t tend to come off the rim, which should reduce the risk of crashing when flatting. Testers say that flat tires were retained on the rim in their experience which indicates that the Gordo, (and its narrower brother, the Semi) will fit most 29″er tires far better than what we are used to seeing.

One of the negatives experienced with Salsa’s previous Delgado Disc design was a pinned and sleeved joint on the rim that would occaisionally be the source of a noise on every rotation. Salsa wanted to eliminate this problem so they chose a welded rim joint for the Semi and Gordo models. The weld area is shown in the photograph above. The weld is ground smooth, as can be seen. This should eliminate any chances for noises and be a stronger joint as well.

Our Gordo samples weighed in a 680 grams each. They are 35.3mm wide overall with an inner rim width of 30mm from inner rim edge to inner rim edge. The ERD on the Gordo is 603mm. Also, the similarly designed Salsa Semi rim is available at a 30mm rim width. Both will be available in 32 and 36 hole versions and the Gordo should retail for about $120.00 each.

Tweny Nine Inches is building up a set of these Gordo rims and will report back with a first impressions post soon.