OUR Race Hubs

Smooth, Balanced, Fast

Not all hubs are made equal

We've been building wheels for nearly 10 years for everyone from the weekend cyclists to race winning teams, and we've seen, worked and tested them all: From the big popular brands, to exotic speciality brands, to the mass-manufactured hubs that many small-medium wheel builders put their stickers on.

But we were never completely happy with any of them. Many were made to a budget, others had reliability flaws, and some had sacrificed performance for vanity weight numbers.

To create wheels that our customers will love, we decided to make the large investment to engineer our own hubs that would outperform the competition in terms of performance, reliability, and value .

strength

Starting from the exterior, all our hub shells are made from thickened, cold forged aluminium to provide stiffness and stability during cornering, sprinting and climbing out of the saddle. The perfect balance of weight and strength is optimised through the use of different thicknesses and reinforcements throughout the shell.

Balance & Stability

In the front hub, we drew in wide flanges with large diameters for extra-wide bracing spoke angles. This provides maximum lateral stiffness and stability during hard cornering, sprinting and climbing.

The rear hub is remarkably more complex because we are limited by the cassette. As the spoke angles are different on both sides, the spoke tensions would be thrown severely off-balance. To provide the maximum stiffness while maintaining stable balance, we had to model different ratios between spoke tensions and bracing angles to arrive at the optimal position for both flanges.

extra large axles

To stiffen the front end, we opted for enlarged 15mm diameter hardened axles (17mm for the disc through- axle version) to counter flex and maximum rigidity.

In the rear, we drastically increased the axle diameter to 18 - 20mm (most rear hubs on the market today are 15-17mm) to dramatically reduce flex. The enlarged axle also allowed us to use a much larger bearing that would better spread the load to keep the wheel spinning smoothly during cornering and free wheeling, and offer better power transfer during high load moments like sprints and climbs.

CUSTOM BEARINGS

Over the years, we’ve used bearings from all the major companies and brand names, many of which you’ve heard of. As we enlarged the sizes of many parts to non industry-standard sizes, we could not find bearing manufacturers who could meet our standards and specifications for performance and reliability. Hence, we decided to invest in custom manufacturing our own bearings.

We partnered with one of the largest manufacturers of precision bearings to fabricate high-load chromium steel bearings that were smoother, faster, and more reliable than the competition, in the sizes we wanted.

Today, we are confident that our bearings consistently outperforms the competition, and we are proud to install them in all Wheel Angel wheels.

Magnetic Pawls

Most freehubs use a pawls and springs mechanism to enable freewheeling. Not us. We didn’t like the big amount of resistance the springs added to the system.

Hence we innovated a proprietary magnetic system that races the freehub through the ratchet with ultra-low drag. When it's time to go, the 42 point pawl system engages instantly and propels you forward towards the finish line.

Sleeve Bearing

We also didn't like that traditional freehubs were linked to the axles with simple ball bearings. Focusing high loads on a single point on a single ball bearing reduces efficiency and performance.

We custom designed our freehubs to be equipped with a proprietary ultra-low friction sleeve bearing. By evenly transferring the high loads across a wide surface, stiffness is significantly increased and reliability is vastly enhanced.

In fact, as the sleeve bearing breaks in after some mileage, it better conforms to the axle’s surface at micron levels to render the rear hub even smoother as you go along.

HUBS AROUND THE WORLD

From Belgium to Brazil, USA to UK, and South Africa to China, we supply wheel builders around the world with Velotechnic hubs to build their high-performance wheelsets.