Hm. I guess I’ll contribute. Ordered a RAR12 laced with CX-Rays to a Boyd Altamont rim from PWB. The Altamont rim and CX-Rays are known quantities at this point, nothing bad to say about them, except maybe that the Altamont rim doesn’t allow nipples to sit at much of an angle, so the spokes kinda bend suddenly near the rim. Not sure if that matters.

First thing I noticed was that the engagement was way faster than my OEM hub. However, the drag was also pretty bad when coasting. The transition from standing to sitting felt like it was slowing me down significantly, even though it was only about a second of coasting. It got to the point where it made me feel uncomfortable on the bike because I felt the need to constantly keep the pedals moving. Also, the freehub kept skipping exactly once if I put down power after coasting. It didn’t happen every time, but it was really frequent. Made it scary to power out of corners or stop signs.

I took out half the pawls to reduce the drag (and maybe fix the the skipping issue?) and it did both, to a certain extent. Freehub drag was more in line with what I was used to, and the skipping was a lot less frequent. Rich from PWB said that loose endcaps can cause this, and I believe him, but it didn’t solve the issue. It was intermittent enough that it would only happen once every few rides, though.

If it means anything, I’ve managed to do this to my DT swiss freehub too. I guess this phenomenon has something to do with me starting to pedal at exactly the wrong moment when coasting, which makes the star ratchet or pawls only partially engage and then kind of cam-out. However, it’s far more rare on the DTs.

This makes me think that there’s a set of exact sectors in the freehub mechanism where putting down power causes a skip. The size of these sectors and the number of them will dictate the probability that, if you randomly put down a ton of power after coasting, your freehub will partially engage and skip exactly once. Taking out one set of pawls from the bitex hub halved this probability. But I imagine the size of these sectors in the Bitex is still higher than the DT because of lower precision or sloppy tolerances.

Anyway. This is all to say that the RAR12 was almost unusable for me in stock form, but removing one set of pawls helped quite a bit. I wouldn’t say my DT350 is in another league or anything but the skipping issue does make me hesitate to recommend Bitex.