I hate my disk brake bike ... I’m Holding onto my 5 emonda rim disk frames and bikes. The pawls just fall out hub on disk hub assembly. And cassette comes off. Could anyone let me know how to tighten the slack up now I’ve pushed the pawls into the hub. Then it’s off on eBay
@@elijahkwon422 Yes, they can be monsters... ...you use similar tactics with clocks as you might with STI shifters. Now hub gears can be harder, and I have yet to master some of them...
STI shifters? I'd like to see a teardown of some Di2's! In any case, this guy has a great video for a set of old, old STI shifters. There's going to be some differences with the modern stuff (eg. with both brake and shifter cables going under the bar tape), but it at least gives you the gist of it. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xkGNN_2CfCY.html
What I want is a quieter freehub. After 30 years with a Regina freewheel (on a Campy hub) that had a very subtle buzz, my new bike with a Shimano freehub just makes such a racket! Part of that may be the amplification of the noise through the CF frame, but really... Great video as usual!
7:35 I don't understand that bit about "more power transfer". Surely, unless the freehub is slipping, power transfer should be 100% when engaged. The only difference would be how quickly the engagement occurs when you start pedalling.
I think what you're thinking of is different than the losses they're talking about. 1 revolution of the chain ring forward would indeed result in 1 revolution of the hub body. But the losses are in the fact that the parts have flex and friction which turns a percentage of the force into heat. The more of those exist the more power you have to put in from your legs to overcome them and rotate the wheel. If the friction is reduced or some of it is eliminated then you can move forward the same amount by using slightly less energy.
@ I'd argue if you're a sprinter or just racing cars the flex in components can become more significant, though if you're on a casual ride it may not matter
@@JonCannings Better reliability, perhaps. The only advantage I see is the *quicker engagement* of, say, a 54 or 36 tooth DT Swiss Hub over a 25, assuming the mechanism can engage that fast (just 6.6 deg or 10 deg of rotation vs 14.4 degrees).
That is the actual efficiency a freehub can do. Material flex does cause some loss in power transfer though as little as they are on smaller components can, in fact, affecting the transfer.
"Free Hub Sound Test"...love it!!! Bike geeks love the sound of free hubs. Love this video and this channel. Keep it up with the amazing stuff. I've learned so much from watching GCN!
I'd really like to see a deep dive into derailleurs! Please discuss topics like derailleur pull geometry, touch on why certain gear levers only work with certain derailleur, and any cross compatibility hacks with derailleurs/cassette options!!
To make your freehub louder, I suggest holding a swap card onto your stays with a clothes peg so it hits your spokes. That's how we did it on our Malvern Stars.
I was helping someone on my saturday ride because their free hub jammed. Thankfully it wasnt the hub, just the plastic cassette guard getting mangled. Could tell they didn't ride often so I'm glad I could help :) great video as always
I have tested various lubricants for the dt star ratchet, besides the original special grease. any grease wether thin or thick is inappropriate to reduce wear of the teeth as it quickly gets displaced and does not return. Additionally, the stiction created by grease impairs the mobility of the ratchet in the drive ring, which is crucial to prevent misengagement and damage to the teeth. the best lubricant hands down is transmission oil (75W/90), maybe hypoid gear oil (85W) is better for hot weather. This oil is thick but thin enough to flow arount, yet does not leak through the seal. it's excellent anti wear property effectively reduces wear by friction which is visible as black "dirty" grease after a short amount of time using grease. I've done my testing on a powerful ebike (750W mid drive motor), making the ratchet's life very hard.
Believe it or not you can get Chris Kings freehub buzz as a ring tone. I have a set of Chris King MTB hubs, but I'll never take them apart as they look more complected than the Shimano hubs. The detailed explanations are greatly appreciated. This is one I'll have to watch more than once. Thanks.
@joncannings, You’ve forgotten to mention that one benefit of having more points of engagement is less lag from coasting to pedaling. This is especially important for XC and technical Trail riding since mountain bikers are often riding in situations where a complete revolution of the crank is not possible due to rocks and other obstacles thus requiring the rider to propel the bicycle by “jogging” the cranks. It for this reason that wheels built with Chris King hubs have become something of a holy grail for many mountain bike enthusiasts. It is also the reason that many other manufacturers have recently been upping the pawl or tooth count in an attempt to swipe a little bit of that hardcore mtb business.
Awesome video, thanks. I'm currently learning on a job to be a technician, this video does a great job of explaining how different technology's and brands of hubs work.
I took my bike in for a full overhaul and my rear wheel came back much, much quieter than when I dropped it off. Having said that, it also feels more smooth and picks up more quickly when I go from freewheeling to putting in power. So while I do miss the noise it made, I feel like it's faster and more responsive now.
Phew! I have a DT Swiss 350 rear hub on my tourer and the freehub came off when I was trying to remove a jammed on cassette! Now that I understand how it works, I'm happy that I've put it back together correctly!
Very thank you to Jon and the GCN Tech's backroom boys so much，since I buy my new Cervelo S5 with DT Swiss wheel very loud freehub sound，so I'm very curious how the freehub looks like and how to they works so long for such massive mileage，then I search anywhere from Google to RU-vid for any freehub explain but there's nothing，until GCN Tech unveil this video，I think it is the first video that talk about freehubs so detailed，and take each brands compare about how insane are the technology，I think this is why GCN makes the world's biggest education program，should you guys get some awards？😝
You load your videos with so much information that I often have to watch it again later to get what I missed the first time. Thanks for the education and all the experience.
JT... aside from performance, it is all about the sound! Loved the sound of the mavic hubs on my '75 Raleigh Competition, until I heard the silky silence of Rolf on my '80's Conalgo Sarroni...weaving silently through neighborhood at night is a sacred pleaser that really is more akin to flying than cycling. Love it. Thank you for this expose.
Hi Jon, I hope you stay on with GCN, seems like others are moving you to the background ala Matt and Emma. In any case, I do really enjoy your competent videos. Cheers!
A really helpful video from the point of view of know what goes on in a freehub but do have a feeling that you have gone into some detail like this when you have gone through the process of servicing a freehub. I am very fortunate to not have to really look at my freehub all that much since the small parts inside bring me out in a cold sweat! Please can we have a video going into the crazy world of headsets... so many different types and ways to install. Would be really useful. Thanks once again Jon!
Thanks for featuring our exploded Supadrive hub guys! :) We find that high engagement offers the ability to build in a bigger surface area between the pawls and drive ring, as well as offering near instant pick up for those all important sprints. Sometimes split seconds make all the difference.
I had clicky freehubs as a kid but in my early 20s (1970s) had a custom bike made and its Shimano hub is still totally silent. These days I ride a Specialized Roubaix and a Giant Toughroad, both of them have silent hubs. However, some of the people I ride with have clicky hubs and I find it annoying to ride behind them. I can't understand why anyone would want a noisy hub.
i think it just sounds cool, sort of like putting an exhaust on a car. another reason you might want it is if you ever get stuck behind some people walking or another biker they would easily hear you when you were to stop pedaling
You can't understand the real feeling of hubs noise i love it and it's like you don't have to own a cycle bell just your hub is like a monster and everyone is looking at you & give you a side
I guess there's a trend here in Germany as most bikes are super loud. I find it very annoying and don't really understand the fuss. it sounds like there's something wrong with the bike and that's gonna break at any moment
I have a bike with a freewheel from 1971. It works great. I was not able to break it down for cleaning but did use WD-40 to clean out old grease and any dirt by spraying it in one side and draining out the other. Afterwards using good penetrating oil in the same manner. It makes a very faint clicking sound, for all intensive purposes it doesn't make a clicking sound at all. I kinda wish it did as I like the sound. A loud free hub means or could mean it's not lubricated or at least not very well which of course leads to a short free hub life.
Thank you for your video explaining free hubs it gave me what i wanted even my oval 900 6 pawls double engagement free hub wasn't in your video , thank you again,,,, from Aussie land
cool walk through, personally the only time I want a loud pawl and click sound is when a steelhead grabs my fly and takes a run, on my bike I think that sounds cheap and plastic like. Not precise DT Swiss for the win on that.
Just got a handbuilt pair (built by and for a mechanic that ended up not using it) with Bitex hubs. I wasn't too fond of the noise at first as my stock wheels were dead silent, but I now appreciate the added safety it gives me on shared paths.
Thoroughly enjoyed that! Have no intentions of depriving the cycle mechanic the joys of servicing & looking after my bike, or indeed of giving him more work due to me "touching" it with tools. Would actually like to see something about chain rings, as I swapped to absoluteBLACK sub-compact oval. Much better for my knees!
Great explanation of each type of freehub but how can I service them? Do I just clean all the old grease away and reapply some fresh? Any areas I must avoid grease etc?
Fascinating video. I love seeing how things work and why things are slightly different. Levers would be interesting with STI/Doubletap/ergoshift differences. Derailleurs too as that would help me understand them better for indexing!
I've ordered a ribble R872 with basic mavic wheels, hopefully they are not too loud, they seem the softest in the video anyway. I don't recall my MTB wheel hub making noise, I'll try it tomorrow.
Shimano's old style roller clutches were terrible because of the spongy pedal feel, they still are in the Alfine 11 hub gear, particularly in 2nd gear, but the new silent clutch in XTR is done very similarly to Chris King but taken a little further so the hub running on uses the spline that drives the toothed washers together (This creates increased engagement force with increased drive torque) to separate the washers and stop the hub making noise. The one downside of the axial engagement style hubs like DT/King is that the smaller the teeth on the washers are, the more sensitive they are to contamination as a small piece of grit between the washers will stop all the teeth on the washers from engaging properly, but that's really a hub sealing issue.
@MJD I've pretty much swapped everything to 6 bolt hubs on my bikes st this stage as I'm fed up with centrelock disks moving around if you load them backwards riding street. I still have an XTR hub on one bike that's about a decade old with thousands of km on it and it's running smoother than a 1 year old XT hub.
With all the craze surrounding freehub noise, here’s an idea for a new segment on the channel: “Name That Freehub”. Post blind sound clips weekly, then ask viewers for guesses. The chosen winner gets GCN gear and maybe even posts the next freehub sound clip? It’ll boost viewer interactivity! Cheers from South Korea!
I am wondering how to disassemble my hub, so I can clean out the grease and neatly put it back together. The hub says Formula on it. The rim had a piece missing along the edge. So I took it apart and recycled the rim and spokes. . RJ the Bike Guy demonstrated using a large hex wrench to get the freewheel thing off, but I couldn't follow what he was doing after that. It's an older style, and I expect it is the type that has loose ball bearings inside.
If you want to see a crazy freewheel mechanism, look no further than the left freewheel in a Sturmey Archer Model X or Model K, or a BSA 3 Speed hub. They have inverted freewheels where a toothed planet cage sits within a ball cup which is fitted with two sprung pawls. When you freewheel, the pawls spin around the static ratchet teeth. Another interesting freewheeling arrangement is to be found in a Sram Automatix hub, where high gear is in fact fixed and in order to freewheel, the hub must change down into low gear, though it does this automatically and will change back up instantly when you start peddling so long as you're above the threshold speed for activating the centrifugal clutch.
Hi John, great and informative as usual. However, you missed out Onxy sprag hubs, which I have on my MTB and CX bikes. I'm sure everyone will be fascinated to see how they work, including me!
Hi Jon love the show, you have explained how free hubs work but how do you know which is the right hub to change it from a 10 to 11 speed as there are a lot of people selling good second hand quality wheels that are 10 speed at bargain prices but when looking for an 11 speed hub there are several of the same make so how do you know which is the right one?
You really want to remove a freehub over a wide tray, to catch the ball bearings, pawls and springs. But it's really not that hard to overhaul one. You just need a couple of specialized tools, with some models, to remove the bearing(s) and end cap. Definitely a more advanced procedure but still easier than building a wheel. Amazing how much torque those tiny pawls can take without breaking. Just 2 on my bike's freehub that carry all the power I'm putting down, in theory up to 1000W each (as if I could ever approach even a fraction of that!).
Finally the content I love, thank you! Pity you didn't disassemble Chris King hub, and glance over contact points (there is a a difference because the more you have faster engagement but it comes at the cost of the lifespan). As for Zipp hub -- shouldn't it mean it is silent when running free (I just checked, Zipp does not offer hubs at all, it looks like you have to buy entire wheel, bad, bad, bad)? My vote for next topic would be internals of the headtube -- how fork is stabilized, what benefits come with tapered headtube, and so on.
Can't understand people who prefer louder free hubs, my newest bike has a much noisier free hub than I am used to and honestly, it disturbs the serenity of my riding. I pedal constantly when coasting with it, just enough to stop the pawls from disengaging. As mentioned, packing your hub with too much grease may cause problems with the pawls when they need to engage, don't do it!
@@prestachuck2867 I can take one apart in 5 mins, they are very simple. The difficult bit is making the special tool required to open it. You won't be able to buy one that's for sure. And don't spill the oil either because that's also not for sale.
Ed R Here’s the tool. www.amazon.com/NuVinci-BRAKE-ADAPTER-Replacement-Parts/dp/B01ND0E8BW . Their cycling division website enviolo.com, is a dead link. Not worth using a product with no support. Junk.
Nice video. How about touchin a subject about different front wheel hubs. There seems to be all kinds of hassle about the freehubs but a lack of talk about the front wheel hubs in RU-vid. Would be nice to know how to service different types of front hubs, tools required etc.
Loving my silent shimano hub i stumbled upon deep in the dungeon under my lbs. I just hope it is meant to be silent and there isn't something really bad about to happen sooner or later.
I have my early '90's Shimano 600 freehub on my commuter bike and you normally can't hear it when riding. Just like it used to be! I hate the trend toward obnoxiously loud freehubs.
My favourite is the Shimano one. My tires are louder than my hub. But this stems from random street racing . We raced at night and being as silent as possible would allow us to overtake more easily . Coupled with my eyes being sensitive to light, I didn't even have lights on my bike. My road bike was called the white ghost because of this. Kinda sad people don't want to race anymore.
I like the DT Swiss one. Theoretical it should be the cheapest to replace if you are able to wear thos teeth out. Just buy a new star ring. Dont know how many Km thag would take.
There is a reason Giant, Bontrager, and Roval all use dt Swiss internals. I own several and they are the easiest to service in my opinion. People say that about Chris king, but Jon didn’t want to take that apart did he. I definitely notice the 36 version over the 18 it’s worth the upgrade. I have a 54 on my mtb, not a noticeable difference over 36. After all, 18 is 20 deg, 36 is 10 deg and 54 is 6.667. I don’t get the obsession to have more than 6 deg engagement, who could notice that? Maybe in the 11 tooth cog I guess.
@@xiaoliuwu984 54T has really fast engagement. I find it easier to put out more instantaneous power and easier to use on hill climbs. 18T is better for cruising since technically there isn't as much resistance.
Industry Nine have a video on their site about taking the oil out of the freehub and replacing it with grease to make it quieter. the video shows how to do it.
I've always wondered why some bikes sound like bees compared to mine that sounds like a cheap hybrid. Thanks for the vid Jon. BTW I used the Shimano RS11 wheelset that came with my bike.
At long last, a glimpse of the Dark Art of Freehubs... my own past attempt at mastering these mysterious components ended with my wheel sitting in my room for two weeks, its guts spilled out in a tray. Then, through some accidental witchcraft on my part, the freehub was fixed - still don't exactly know what I did right...
