Upgraditis #2

Borrowed Rims

Well, I had managed to get the utility bike put together on budget... and then, wouldn't you Adam and Eve it, the trouble and strife wants her wheels back. Clearly, a fine excuse for fettling together a replacement set, if ever I done hear one.

Sharks With Frickin' Lasers

I fancy lasers...

Laserdiscs, that is...

Man, these things are sooo last year - exactly why they were on Ebay for £60 the pair. Grand. And, CRC's clearance reductions for a pair of Laserdisc XC rims at the wallet bursting £9 each. Clearly with all this lasering going on, the spokes should be Sapim Lasers?

Sadly not, my budget ran out. I will have to make do with...

Ill Tempered Sea Bass

...Alpina ACI (2mm-1.7mm-2mm) spokes.

Evil Clutches

WTB license the freehub design from American Classic, both of whom have their hubs manufactured by Chin Haur. They are almost a carbon copy of AC's lightweight hubs.

The hub has an slightly unusual freehub mechanism - the pawls aren't sprung loaded, instead they're driven inward by a clutch plate, and the clutch plate is actuated by the tip of a single large spring coil embedded in the freehub.

So, with no sprung pawls, and only the single tip of the clutch spring ticking over the clutch plate, the freehub is somewhat quiet. I'm not sure that's a big selling point, but there we go. More interesting is the weight (which is quite low, not the lightest out there, but close enough).

Dissection

These hubs, they're real easy to dismantle and do a bearing swap. A few points to note:

1. Don't lose the wafer thin washer between freehub and main hub body. The freehub won't rotate properly if it is left out.
2. Don't lose the wafer thin spacer that goes on the freehub before the cassette.
3. Wow, just that one piece of rubber keeps all the dirt out of the clutch / pawl cavity.

The build & finish looks generally excellent. The freehub gets a lot of flak in reviews - that single rubber seal keeping dust out of the clutch/pawl area is a bit, well, weak. I think it's going to be quite important to give these things regular servicing every few months (depending on riding conditions). That said, the freehub/hub body seal seems to be the only real minus point in the design of these hubs. So, dismantling and servicing goes like...

• remove (non-drive side) end cap by undoing the two bearing preload nuts (the drive side axle will need holding securely in a soft jaw vice)
• now pull freehub from hub body, axle & freehub will come out
• remove freehub from axle
• notice in hub body, the clutch plate
• notice in freehub, the single coil spring which actuates the clutch plate
• remove pawls & clutch plate
• bearings simply tap out, as per almost every other hub out there, and are a press fit to get back in
• clean it up, add light lube (i.e. not using lashings of thick grease)
• reassemble

Rims

So you may have guessed by now I'm a closet WTB fan, especially the rims. I've had a long lived set of Speeddisc rims which survived a fair amount of abuse on a hardtail and are still going some years later, and another Laserdisc rim used for some time now on an xc bike. All those have been accurate from the factory and this means the wheel builds have been easy. So the chance to pick up two rims for peanuts was quite tempting.

Incidentally, tubeless fans, in common with all WTB rims, these have a decent bead hook and they convert to tubeless very well (if you excuse the deep centre section).

Finished Product

The result of a few hours of lacing & truing:

Rear	Preload adjusters on rear	Rear
Front	Front	Rims
Front	Bearing in front hub	Rear

Weights

Reported weights (ref: WTB's website) of the rims are 440g, the hubs are 145g (front) and 264g (rear). DB spokes I have seen listed at approx 400g for two wheels worth.

These days its not uncommon to be seeing 340g rims (Sun EQ21, Stans Crest) but, (1) I'm not the lightest cat on the block and these are plenty light enough for me and, (2) at £9 each I wasn't arguing about the other 100g.

Anyway, the "official" weights add up to about 1700g for both wheels (minus skewers, tyres, tubes, etc). If I ever get excited enough about losing 200g I can swap rims for Suns or Stans to get a 1500g pair of hoops.

The measured weights for bare wheels turned out pretty close to predicted: front 759g and rear 963g. Total 1722g and that comes to within a couple of  % of the weights listed on WTB's site. My scales could easily be that much wrong.

Useful Links

• Official service guide from WTB: ServiceLDLiteV6.pdf
• Tech drawing of front hub from WTB: WTB_LaserDisc_Lite_Front_Hub.pdf
• Tech drawing of rear hub from WTB: WTB_LaserDisc_Lite_Rear_Hub.pdf
• MTBR forum thread, loads of useful info & photos of rear hub being disassembled: wtb-laser-disc-lite-rear-hub-servicing-pics-213156.html
• Enduro bearings page (the hubs take 6 bearings, all MR 1526 LLU-5): enduroforkseals 

So what was the point of all this?

Well, two things really. I wanted to show that with a bit of hunting, there are quality components out there, new and unused, that you can pick up for a relative pittance. WTB still list these things at $680 on their website and I'm fairly sure they were sold in the UK for around £300 - £400. The hubs are still punted on WTB's current wheelsets (Stryker TCS range). At closeout prices, the total price I paid for these hoops was less than £100. Maybe I won't be able to find these again, but there will definitely be something out there going for much less than normal retail value...

The other thing was to collate a few decent reference links for hub servicing, partly for my own future benefit and partly of benefit to any of you out there armed with google.

Stay tuned!