On-One Max Hubset Review & Servicing

This is a Service Guide + First Impressions review of On-One's value for money AM hubset, sold as part of their "MAX Adaptable Maxle Wheelset", or on their own for £80 a pair (£40 each, front and rear).

Everythings cheaper up north...

Well, you can't argue with the price. This is about as good as it gets for a 20mm front hub, and a 10mm bolt-thru rear hub. These hubs will run you a total of £80 for both front and rear hubs from the Yorkshire based outfit On-One (or is it Planet-X? I can never tell).

Close competition comes from Superstar's Switch EVO hubs, which are £20 more but do have four cartridge bearings at the rear, Halo's Spin Doctor, Octane One Orbitals, DMR Revolver 3-pawl, the inevitable Shimano offerings - SLX at this price point, and of course a huge number of others I haven't listed. It's a fairly competitive sector of the hub market - although the prices for through-axle style hubs have yet to drop to the level of QR hubs.

On One?

Well, no, only "sort of". On-One are not Hope - so no in-house manufacture here. These are the product of the Chosen Hub Co. of Taiwan (you might have guessed it was a rebrand from the price). Anyway, lets take a look inside...

Ghetto Tubeless Inflater

DIY bottle inflater doing its stuff

This really does make the trickiest stage of a tubeless conversion (getting the first inflation) easy as cake.

Manitou Evolver ISX6 Setup

Dark horse?

X Marks the Shock

Fox, Rockshox... I wanted different, I wanted special, I wanted, well, some suspension made by a company who didn't end with "X"... So I bought a Manitou Evolver. It is not a current model (2010) - the 2012 equivalent is  the Swinger Pro DC which adds a lockout, but is (I believe) internally the same shock.

The Evolver is a large volume air shock, with a lot of adjustability: main air spring, rebound damping, separate high + low compression damping, mildly mysterious volume adjust, and the even more mysterious IFP (so mysterious it only has a three letter acronym), are all separately adjustable.

Don't try this at home.

WTF?

Confused by the adjustments? I was. The manual is crap. It doesn't even tell you what the IFP does! And this shock has a lot of adjustments. After some time scouring the net, I found a few things out about the shock, and how to set it up. If you don't own one, sorry  - this post probably won't be that interesting... if you do, read on.

Double Chainguide, a Cautionary Tale...

Chain Gang

Losing your chain from the cranks a bit too regularly? Me too. I wanted to use a chainguide on my bike to fix that. I have a double chainring setup, so that means going with a guide like MRP's Long Range Patrol or the Blackspire Stinger:

MRP's Long Range Patrol - bashring and chainguide.

Ghetto Tubeless Links

Just a quick follow up from previous post to add some resource links:

UtahMTB's Tubeless Hints

http://www.utahmountainbiking.com/fix/tubeless-hints.htm

Pinkbike's Tubeless puncture repair guide

http://www.pinkbike.com/news/Tech-Tuesday-Three-Ways-to-Save-A-Leaky-Tubeless-Tire-2012.html

Ghetto Tubeless Walk-through

What is this ghetto tubeless thing anyway?

So, normal bike tyres use a rubber inner tube, the inner tube sits inside the tyre and is a cheap and easy way to keep air inside your tyres (you know this already). A ghetto tubeless setup does away with the regular inner tube, instead relying on the tyre itself to hold air, and a narrow strip of a BMX inner tube to seal the rim. Being ghetto, this is of course done at minimal cost and with your existing hardware.

You can buy ready-to-go rims ("UST") which are airtight (and expensive) and tyres that work on these rims without sealant (heavy, also expensive)... but then why would you be reading this guide to doing it on the cheap?

Look how happy the Michelin Man is with his tubeless tyre.

Regular tubes vs ghetto tubeless

Regular inner tubes work ok. For road bikes they work pretty good. On a mountain bike you have less pressure in the tyres, and as a result you are much more likely to have pinch flats ("snakebites") where the tube is cut by the rim itself as the rim bangs up against something solid. Plus, you tend to ride over rough ground in the great outdoors - with a lot of spiky stones and thorns and other sharp things. Result = punctures.

A ghetto tubeless setup relies on having liquid latex sealant slosh around inside the tyres. When you get a puncture from a thorn or (small!) stone the latex sealant will be able to seal the puncture, a lot of times without you even noticing. Instantly, 90% of your previous puncture problems vanish. That's the promise, anyway.