Originally Posted by
Kimmo
Dude, how?! Bust out a felt-tipped pen and a napkin and take a pic with your phone, and show me how any load from those ratchet bearings gets into the hubshell. Aside perhaps from some negligible percentage under power, from friction between pawls and ratchet. Bending loads on the axle push and pull on the pawls laterally, so it's a merely academic consideration how much that's holding your hub together. Nothing much at all is, aside from being clamped in the frame. These hubs are stupid.
If you insist on continuing to deny it, show me your alleged load path in a diagram.
The load path isn't to the hub shell, it's to the axle ends and the frame.
That double row bearings isn't all that common in the hubs I've worked on. In fact, I've never seen one.
If the end of the axle were unsupported like in a freewheel (borrowed from Wikipedia)
you might have a point that the axle is prone to bending but the ends of the axle in a cartridge bearing hub
are supported and are no more likely to bend than a Shimano hub...something that I have already stipulated above.
Originally Posted by
Kimmo
An appeal to ubiquity doesn't cut much ice in a sub-optimal world. I'd consider shagged-out cartridge bearings pretty ubiquitous too, based on how many I've come across. If you have a cartridge bearing hub you want to convince me is the tits, you can start out by pointing to the preload adjustment for the angular contact bearings.
I'm not sure where you get you cartridge bearings but I've worked at my local co-op for a decade and have ridden cartridge bearing hubs for nearly 4 decades. I very seldom run across a "shagged-out" cartridge bearing whether it is in a headset, bottom bracket, jor bicycle wheel. In 10 years of my work at the local co-op...working on 15,000 to 20,000 bikes...I have not once seen a cartridge bearing wheel I've had to work on and I've only seen a handful of bottom brackets with bad cartridge bearings. On the other hand, I can't begin to count the number of loose bears hubs, bottom brackets and headsets I've worked one.
As for the preload adjustment, any that is needed is taken care of by the end caps. As there is little need in doing any "adjustment" to the bearings, there is very little adjustment available.
And, finally, I've not seen a bent axle on a Shimano freehub hub. They are far superior to freewheel hubs. But, on the other hand, I've never seen a bent axle on a cartridge bearing hub either.