Originally Posted by
Campag4life
Yeah...comes down to cost/benefit. Boyd is wrong when he talks about rear bearing spacing of his design relative to the industry. Campy has two bearings in the freehub alone and Campy rear hub bearings are as outboard as Boyd rear hubs and it could be argued that the Campy freehub is better supported by having two bearings versus one. The devil is in the details and I just don't see any watershed with the Boyd hubs. In fact they maybe worse because even if the design is innovative, only test is hundreds of thousands of cycling miles to determine how robust the design really is.
The vast majority of owners won't notice an ounce of difference between Boyd hubs and those at half the price...same applies to CK and other pricey hubs.
There is a difference between freehub body bearings and load bearings. On a traditional hub where the axle runs through the entire system. The load bearings are pressed between the axle and the hub shell. If the freehub body were removed, the two bearings in the hub shell still provide load to the wheel.
Our freehub body still has two bearings in it. Three actually, but one of them becomes a load bearing. This is because the freehub body sits on the hub shell, vs sitting on the axle. So the freehub body becomes an extension of the hub shell, vs just butting up against it. By supporting the freehub body by the hub shell, this is what allows us to put the load bearing so far out.
As I mentioned in my previous post, we have had quite a bit of testing done. This is both on computer programs with the designs and getting people around town here to ride them hard.
It's up to the consumer to decide of the hubs are "worth" it or not. People love innovation and there are some definite advantages to our design. There's a reason why CK or White Industries hubs are so popular right now and with good reason. They are awesome hubs and a great upgrade. We have something that is truly on that level, at the NAHBS show when we released the hub we had some of the other hub companies coming up to the booth and were pretty amazed by what we released. It was a really cool feeling to have companies that I really look up to give us those accolades.