Swap out 60l50db for 700c

[so solid crew]

I currently own a sonder camino gravel bike with 650db wheels running 50 mm tyres. I do a mixture of road and light off road and want to go to narrower and slightly smoother tyres. If I was to swap to a 700c wheel size to open up to a wider range of tyres selections, would it be a straight swap for the wheels or would they not fit?

Many thanks

 

[Ajax Bay]

https://sheldonbrown.com/650b.html
Currently your circumference is 2090mm (divide by 2π for the effective radius).
The limitation is radius max.
From a fairly wide ETRTO 584 (650B, 27.5", your 50) to middling 700c (say 622-38) the difference is negligible - in fact it's the same.
HTH

 

[fossyant]

Generally a straight swap - certainly worth having two wheelsets for a gravel bike (got three for mine).

Only factor is you may need a small cassette spacer as some hubs are slightly different alignment for the cassette, so indexing can be slightly out for one set of wheels. You can by a pack of assorted spacers on-line. For example, one wheel may use say a 1.5mm spacer, but the other requires you to use a 1mm or even a 2mm to get the same cassette alignment. It's less of an issue if using the similar hubs from the same manufacturer from around the same release date.

I have some wheels where the difference has been just 0.25mm -it makes a difference to the shifting if you don't get it right.

 

[N0bodyOfTheGoat]

I think if you bought a set of 700/29 wheels with a wider internal rim width, you will be able to run wider 700/29er tyres, because the wider rim will widen the tyre and lower the diameter and circumference (instead of a tall light bulb shape it will become squatter and squarer).

Now how wide an internal rim you would need to fit say a 40mm Caracal Race (brilliant for dry tarmac and dry light offroad, with very low rolling resistance), I don't know. My 45mm measures ~46.5mm on 21mm internal rim width rear wheel.

Google AI (big spade of salt required) thinks the Sonder has 700x50mm clearance, but you would want 21-25mm IRW to prevent a squirmy light bulb shaped tyre.

 

[wafter]

The difference between 650b and 700c on the rim rad is 19mm; so for the same rolling radius as 650b x 50mm you'd be looking at 700c x 41mm.

Obviously with a bit of waggle room as it's not essential to keep the same rolling radius; although bear in mind going smaller will have implications for trail (will make handling faster) and crank ground clearance.

Going narrower on tyres you should be fine, but note that there may potentially be issues with chainstay clearance if the crimps have been located to favour 650b.

If you can you might want to test a set of 700c wheels - I have 35s on my Genesis and tbh would go fatter if I could, with the pitiful state of the roads round here.