A plug for Shimano XT (M770) hubs

On Mar 16, 1:17*am, Chalo wrote:
landotter wrote:

Same goes for King headsets. Most of
my friends immediately throw one on any bike they purchase. Well made
overkill--and tacky as hell branding.

What makes King headsets good is its use of angular cartridge
bearings. Shimano, CK Cane Creek and several others use this same
design. Jobst described how it worked he

"Shimano, Chris King, Cane Creek and others, offer angular contact,
full ball complement, spherically aligned cartridge bearings. The
Shimano cartridge bearings have contact seals, not exposed to weather,
to retain grease for life of the bearing. The races are sufficiently
reentrant that they snap permanently together with sufficient preload
to prevent rocking (fretting) motion perpendicular to the rotational
axis. Spherical steel rings, that move as plain bearings against an
aluminum housing, support the cartridge bearing to absorb, otherwise
damaging, out-of-plane motion while the cartridge bearing does the
steering."

As for the tacky branding, when I bought my first threadless headset
back in the late 90s, CK was one of 2 or 3 choices for threadless. At
that time, even Campy didn't have a threadless headset. Interestingly,
the King headset I choose was silver and had no labeling at all. It
actually looked like an old NR headset. Today, you can still buy the
no label headset from CK, now called "Sotto Voce," but it now comes at
a premium.








Too bad they're not nearly as fault tolerant or serviceable as
headsets costing a sixth as much.

As for hubs, the new Formula loose ball fixed/free high flange hubs
are really nice-- smooth, well sealed, attractive, with good
hardware. *They have wide rear flange spacing, so they need to be
widened to 135mm over locknuts to support 7-speed freewheels. *But
they'll do 6-speed on 130mm and 5-speed on 126mm.

Chalo

On Mar 16, 12:17*pm, bfd wrote:
On Mar 16, 1:17*am, Chalo wrote: landotter wrote:

Same goes for King headsets. Most of
my friends immediately throw one on any bike they purchase. Well made
overkill--and tacky as hell branding.

What makes King headsets good is its use of angular cartridge
bearings. Shimano, CK Cane Creek and several others use this same
design. Jobst described how it worked he

[snip]

I don't think he adequately explained colorway. Because if it was
about function--the Pajama Jeans crowd would be riding S3s.