A few dedicated followers emailed me to ask if I was the skinny dude shown in VeloNews’s recently released Ultimate Ride Guide. So this afternoon I popped into the Boulder Book Store on the Pearl Street Mall and shelled out $6.99 for my own copy. Okay, truth be told I first thumbed through the publication, not wanting to spend the seven bucks if it was actually my doppelganger, before heading to the register.

Well I guess that having my photo on page 94, without any mention of my name, hardly counts as fame, but my daughter was still excited.

And it’s nice to see ExcelSports.com get some coverage here, too, as they’ve been super supportive of me for over a decade. This photo, shot with my iPhone, doesn’t do it much justice — the actual spread show Excel’s colors quite nicely.

Here we have some new dash hubs! The guys at Dash are always improving their designs and some how keep getting lighter and lighter. The set weighs 894g  by our scale(with steel spokes!).  If you were to use AX -Lightness rims they would be 804g. Ti spokes would make this even lighter, 700g wheel set anyone? The hubs use  full ceramic all but one place (where the cassette meets the hub)  but all hybrid bearings are an option.

The rear is 100.3g with 1 hybrid and 3 full ceramics and the front is 29.7g.

The wheels need to be built up before the bearings are pressed in, and the hubs need special tools to be worked on. So Dash will be selling wheel sets starting at the end of April for $3000. The hubs that you can work on will weigh more than the hubs that come pre built into a wheel and they will be coming out later this year.

After a few years we finally made a newsletter. Check it out http://eepurl.com/cP6TQ.

-Brian

We recently posted a photo teaser on the new crazy-light DASH hubs. which are hand made here in sunny Boulder, Colorado. We would have taken them apart, and shown photos of the internals, but doing so requires special tools which we don’t yet have. We hope to get a set of tools in a few weeks. I did get some more specs on the hubs from Weston Snyder at DASH Cycles and given all of the interest in the hubs we figured it was better to post something than nothing at all. Weston also said he’d send us some photos of the internals in about a week and we will post those when we get them.

Rear Hub

Weight:

• 98 grams

Dimensions:

• Non-Drive flange diameter – 33mm
• Drive flange diameter – 52mm
• Non-Drive center to flange – 36mm
• Drive center to flange – 19mm
• Axel diameter – 15mm

Bearings

• 2×6803 2×6802 full ceramic Enduro’s

Drillings

• 20h
• 24h
• 24h
• triplet

Front hub

Weight:

• 30 grams

Dimensions

• Flange diameter – 29mm
• Center to flange – 39mm
• Axel diameter – 12mm

Bearings

• 2×6801 full ceramic Enduro’s

Drillings

• 16h
• 18h
• 20h

My real question is how well will the full-ceramic bearings hold up, particularly the drive-side hub bearing. After talking to Chuck Panaccione from SuperFly Cycles, who is a veritable bearing guru and who has quite a bit of experience with both full-ceramic and hybrid ceramic bearings, I think that the additional weight of a hybrid might be worth it. But maybe the marketing value of a sub-100 gram rear hub outweighs, literally, the extra durability of ceramic hybrids. Weston did say that they’ve been putting quite a few miles on these hubs, and haven’t had issues with the full-ceramics, so that’s encouraging. I think I need to build up a set for myself and start piling on the miles. Just please don’t tell my wife what they cost…

For photos of the hub, visit our last post on the DASH hubs.

This is just a teaser of some crazy light road hubs we got from DASH. They are NOT VAPORWARE — we are currently building some into wheels to evaluate.  But for those who can’t wait for our review, picture is worth a thosan… make that a picture is worth 98 grams:

I just turned 42 yesterday, which means I’ve been racing my bike for 30 years. When I started riding, at age 12, I had Detto Peirtro wooden-soled shoes, wool shorts, and a 28-pound 12-speed Centurion racing bicycle. Racing as a USCF Intermediate (back then they had Midgets, Intermediates and Juniors), due to our gear restrictions, I think my largest chainring was a 48t, and my smallest chainring was a 42t. In the back it was something like a 14-21. (14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21) To have a “corncob cassette”, something like a 13-18 straight block, was the ultimate in cool. To have a 25t or 28t cog on your freewheel marked you as a Fred, and was reserved for 40-something year old scientists who had little mirrors affixed to the sides of their Bell Biker helmets. My “granny gear” at the time was a 42/21.

Now skip forward 30 years. I’m about to race up Mt. Washington with a pie plate on my 10-pound Cervelo R3-SL. Last year I watched Ned Overend ride away from me, with his ultra-low mountain bike gearing, something like a 24/32, as I slogged away in my 34/27. Don’t get me wrong, he would have climbed away from me even if we had the same gearing, but he sure looked more efficient spinning than I felt grinding. This year I decided to figure out a way to get a sub 1:1 low gear and at the same time be able to use my Quarq power meter. The solution I came up with was to use a SRAM XX 10-speed cassette and SRAM XX long cage rear derailleur, in conjunction with my RED double-tap shifters. It shifts really well, and all I need to complete the package is a rearview mirror affixed to the side of my helmet.

I’m excited about the someday-to-be-released Metrigear pedal based power meter system, but I got tired of waiting and decided that it was time to add power to my weight weenie machine. Here are a few photos of the system weight including everything except for the head unit. The lightest head unit I could find was the Bontrager Node 2, but I like the Garmin EDGE 500 better, so that’s what I’ve been using. The Node is maybe 20 grams lighter than the Garmin, but the display on the Node shows your speed in huge numbers and the power in really small numbers, and you can’t configure the display to do otherwise. I don’t really care how fast I’m going, but I really care about the wattage I’m producing. The Bontrager Node also doesn’t store the power data, rather it just displays it. This is fine for pacing yourself while racing, but it’s not much good if you want to analyze the numbers later. The Garmin, on the other hand, lets you configure the display so that your power is most prominent, and I love it. I have mine configured to show power (largest), heart rate, cadence and distance.

The 622 gram scale photo includes the cranks, the Quarq, the BB cups with ceramic bearings, and even the BB magnet attachment.

Nico Toutenhoofd and Kevin Nicol approach the finish line at the 2010 Lookout Mountain Hill Climb in Golden, Colorado. Photo by Dejan Smaic

I got mentioned in this blog post about “old guys” and hill climbs. It’s not a big story, but the comments amuse me. The question is “Do the old guys (that’s me) only race well when the young guys are out of town?”

303cycling.com/master-cyclist-win-big-at-lookout-mountain-hill-climb

If nothing else, it does seem to me that there are fewer juniors racing, and more salt-and-pepper dads, then in the ’80s.

AX-Lightness ALPHA 580 gram frame

LUST is the only word I can use to describe my feeling for this photo… I’ve heard rumblings of the AX-Lightness frame, but in recent days those rumblings seem to have turned into reality. While Photoshop hobbyists might spend days working on fake iPhone images, they don’t generally work on fake bike frame photos; this is real and I WANT ONE!

Now will it really weigh 580 grams for a small? And just how big is a small? And will it be stiff enough for real racing? Given my experience with AX-Lightness, and their history for producing awesome stuff, I’m going to remain optimistic.

So what I know so far is that the price for the frame only is supposed to be 3900 €, and the price for the frame+fork+headset is supposed to be 4600 €. When you compare that to the recently announced Cervelo California Project, this seem like a veritable bargain. With the current exchange rate that’s $5,300 for the frame, sans fork and headset.

There’s a discussion on the frame on the Weight Weenie forum here: http://weightweenies.starbike.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=71934 And if you can read German, then you can check out this page: http://www.forum.light-bikes.de/showthread.php?t=12893

New RH-180 and FH-50 hubs from C-4

Here’s a sneak preview of some new hubs from C-4 that are in production now, and will be available in limited quantities within a few weeks. The hubs arrived via FedEx and I had the opportunity to play with the hubs, take a few photos, and then I had to wrap them back up and send them back.

C-4 names their hubs based on the weight. This new rear hub will come in two different flavors, the more budget-conscious RH-180 and the no-holds-barred RH-160. The production RH-180 is supposed to weight 185 grams, and I was told that it might even tip the scales a few grams under that. And the lighter version, the RH-160, as the name suggests, should end up right around 160 grams. (This pre-production RH-180 weighs 197 grams on our scale.)

RH-180 possible specs: (I can’t guarantee any of these….)

• MSRP $395 USD
• 100% manufactured and assembled in the U.S. (Orange County, CA)
• 15mm quad butted aluminum axle
• Hub shell CNCd from 7000 series aluminum
• Patent pending self-adjusting bearing preload system. (I don’t know anything more about this)
• 4 Phil Wood cartridge sealed bearings. 1 6902 for the drive side and 3 6802 bearings — one for the non-drive side and two for the cassette body.
• Forged aluminum cassette body.
• Available in 20, 24, and maybe 28h?
• Colors: black for sure, sliver most likely, red probably, gold & blue unknown.

RH-160 possible specs: (again, no promises here….)

• MSRP $495 USD
• 100% manufactured and assembled in the U.S. (Orange County, CA)
• 15mm quad butted aluminum axle
• Hub shell CNCd from 7000 series aluminum
• Patent pending self-adjusting bearing preload system. (I don’t know anything more about this)
• 4 ceramic hybrid sealed bearings. 1 6902 for the drive side and 3 6802 bearings — one for the non-drive side and two for the cassette body.
• Machined aluminum cassette body (lighter than the forged one for the RH-180)
• Titanium ratchet rings (lighter than the steel ratchet rings in the RH-180)
• Titanium pawls (lighter than the steel pawls in the RH-180)
• Available in 20, 24, and maybe 28h?
• Colors: black for sure, sliver most likely, red probably, gold & blue unknown.

The pre-production hub that I had the opportunity to play with came in at 197 grams, and that was with full ceramic (not ceramic hybrid) bearings. C-4 has no intention of using full ceramic bearings, rather they had them in there for a show, where hundreds of people would be spinning the axles in their hands. The production hubs will lose weight over this pre-production hub mostly due to some hub shell modifications, a new axle design, and a different end cap. And the RH-160 will benefit from a significantly lighter cassette body (CNCd rather than forged) as well as the titanium ratchet rings and pawls.

There are a few other nice design touches worth mentioning. One thing that I love is that you can simply pull the cassette body off of the hub and replace it with a Campy cassette body — no tools required. This is wonderful if you’re a shop or wheel builder and don’t want to have to stock as many hubs or wheels. You can simply get all of your hubs in Shimano and then keep a few Campy cassettes on hand. The wheel dish doesn’t even change if you swap cassette bodies. (2009 and later PowerTap hubs are the same way and I love it.) I realize that there is a small sacrifice in terms of flange spacing, and optimizing spoke triangulation, from Shimano to Campy, but to me the trade off is worth it.

The drive-side flange is angled toward the center of the hub, to allow for less bend in the spokes. Similarly, the hols in the non-drive ring (no flange) are angled toward the center of the rim.

FH-50 front hub specs: (These I feel more confident on, but again, no promises…)

• MSRP $135 USD (standard) or $155 USD (ceramic)
• 100% manufactured and assembled in the U.S. (Orange County, CA)
• Adjustable preload
• Phil Wood or ceramic 698 bearings
• Available in 16, 18, 20 and maybe 24h?
• Colors: black for sure, sliver most likely, red probably, gold & blue unknown.

While technically a pre-production hub, this one won’t see any real changes before production, other than getting polished and anodized. This hub will be available with Phil Wood bearings or ceramic hybrid bearings. The ceramic bearings drop the weight by about 2.5 grams.

Final thoughts… These look like awesome hubs. There are lighter hubs out there, like the M5 flanged front and the ExtraLite SX rear. But the M5 flanged front uses micro 688 bearings, and it isn’t specifically designed for radial lacing. And the ExtraLite SX rear hub reduces weight by substituting bushings for one of the cassette bearings. So if these hubs are robust and reliable, then they should be popular — time will tell.

And for those who like pictures, here’s some eye-candy: