How we started - a brief history
People are alway curious how we started, back in the days of the inner tube – when we were keen XC racers we discovered and started playing with tubeless products converting non-tubeless rims to tubeless. Jon (after registering www.Justridingalong.com very early in the internet 2001) brought the Stans tubeless conversion kits and Eclipse kits for our bikes and then started selling the Eclipse (now DT Swiss) kits to other keen racers. In 2005 we started importing Stans NoTubes rims along side when they developed their first tubeless rims, straight away customers started asking for them to be built into complete wheels so – always having built our own wheels, we obliged, and borrowed a wheel stand off some friends.
Timeline - a chronological history
2001
started justridingalong.com
we brought the domain name www.justridingalong.com and started a mountain biking and cross-country racing blog
2003
imported Eclipse tubeless kits
started to imported Eclipse tubeless kits from Switzerland to use on our own mountain bikes and started selling them on Just Riding Along. These are re-useable plastic strips that to have a tubeless profile and enabled regular wheels and tyres to be used tubeless. Later rebranded as DT Swiss.
2004
importing Stan's NoTubes tubeless kits
began importing Stan’s NoTubes tubeless kits and selling online and at races. Based on a rubber inner tube material they offered an alternative to Eclipse.
2005
imported NoTubes rims
Stans NoTubes brought out a tubeless rim which we imported and built into our own wheels and for customers who ordered our first tubeless mountain bike wheels.
2006
1st UK internet based custom wheel builder
offered custom tubeless wheel builds online – the first UK internet based custom wheel builder. Moved the workshop north from Dorking to Sheffield
2010
moved into road wheels
our first road wheelsets built on imported Stan’s NoTubes Alpha 340 tubeless road rims, an early road tubeless rim
2012
P&K Lie, Phil Woods
invested in PK&Lie wheel jig and Phil Woods spoke cutter. Began importing Industry Nine components (which we continued with until 2018).
2014
JRA own brand wheels launched
Introduced our first own-brand wheelsets with components sourced directly from the factory
2015
Holland mechanics
invested in wheel building machinery to build consistently better wheels. This included a Holland Mechanics ISL lacing machine, and custom built wheel de-tensioning machine
2017
moved to York
We moved the workshop from Sheffield to York at the beginning of this year. At the same time we cut out most other brand components to focus solely on our own brand range.
2020
laser engraving brought in-house
brought laser engraving of hub and rim graphics in-house for ultimate flexibility and quality
today
our wheel range
our range now contains 14 different types of wheel for every type of riding, and we continue to improve and develop them.