 Are you ready? For a hub shootout, ladies and gentlemen, where we have the exact same creative carbon 45 millimeter rim, the exact same SAPM CX-ray spokes across eight wheels, which gives us four sets with the only difference across all of these wheels, being the heart and soul of the wheel. The hub. So today we have 16 different wattage based speed tests and expert mechanics point of view on these four hubs and my general dickhead YouTuber thoughts on each hub after riding them all over the past six months. A massive thank you to Michael from Creative Carbon Wheels for providing these wheels today for this video and a quick word from him as a thank you, no expense spare in creating these carbon rims with the focus on weight. So the first cab off the rank. And you said it sounded really nice. Do you like the sound of that hub? And I think people, as much as we think it's a bit wanky, I think that that's sometimes something that makes a difference. So we're going to listen to each hub sound before Aaron gives his mechanical point of view. And I've got here what I'm calling a hub omiter. It's going to be recording the sound. I'm going to be moving it in and out. And we're starting here on not my favorite, but it's a pretty nice sounding hub. It's the DT Swiss 180s. This is the Ratchet EXP free hub body. These come through with a 36 tooth engagement driver. Good thing with DT Swiss is you can purchase a upgrade kit and this produces a 54 tooth engagement, your engagement take-up. So as you're going through your freewheeling and then you go to engage your crank set, it'll engage quicker and more responsive. We probably use a lot more in Marathon biking where you really want that instantaneous engagement. But all of these hubs, when we go through them, you'll see that they are all trying to do higher engagements. This is still fantastic, 36, but 54 is just a bit better. A couple hundred bucks. So it's not cheap, but it is probably worth it. You do need tooling to do that with DT, so you probably have to go to a store that has the DT tooling. The actual hub itself is not much different to the original Ratchet, but the Ratchet EXP is a lighter version. Very easy for people to remove and service themselves though because we just pull the end cap off. We can take the free hub body off easily, clean and re-grease this assembly with no tooling. It's only when you need to change the ring that you need tooling. So next up we have the extra lights, which we have done an independent video on in the past, which I'll link up there. But before we listen to the hub sound on the extra light, it's probably a good time to talk about weight. So for the speed test, I was using the BMC team machine. I strategically picked the lowest wind day possible. And I had all wheels lined up the evening before these tests with eight brand new pairs of the Vittoria Corsa Pro 26 millimeter clincher tire with their lightweight tubes. Many thanks to Vittoria, my personal favorite tire company for sending me these tires and tubes for this project. So I could optimize the wheel changes, which is very important because as the morning progresses, the wind conditions will typically change. And as you can see here from all these wind app screenshots I take before each run, the wind literally started as nothing and progressed a very light northwesterly and west northwesterly winds by the final test. So the first segment was up, a one and a half kilometer climb at 3.6% average gradient, attempting to average 300 watts. As you can see, the Chris Kings and the extra lights are basically the same with fair wind conditions and the white industries and DT Swiss's are slightly faster. But that slight wind change will give an ever so slight tailwind up that climb, which will probably explain that two to three second time gap. The second segment is a 1.6 kilometer descent where I have a run up riding at 300 watts up to a signpost and then I free pedal in a tucked position. Because of the slight wind that crept in pushing up the hill, no doubt the white industries and DT Swiss's were at a slight disadvantage. So all in all, from these tests I was a little bit disappointed because these tests require a lot of time and effort. And really there's no compelling data to say that one hub is better than the other. But perhaps that makes sense. They're all high quality hubs and perhaps if there was any standout for me was I was anticipating the extra lights because of the weight to be noticeably faster up the hills but perhaps they need a steeper climb for that. So this is what the extra light hub sounds like. This requires tooling to remove the free hub body. We went through this last time. So to do that, it is two 17 mil spanners to remove it. One to hold the axle, one to remove the lock nut. The free hub body itself runs a pull system. This is the super lightweight one, obviously with the rubber o-ring. Yeah, weight. They're going for ultimately lightweight kind of hub shell. So correct. So you've got less engagements with this one. Yes. Actually, I don't know the number on this one. I'll double check that. But this engagement is a lot less. You can just see it. I mean, the actual teeth engagements are a lot, lot less. These are ultra lightweight hub. With a pressure point on that, I mean, I'm sure they have their reasons but if you really loaded that up, I would assume you would destroy this quicker than you would like the next hub we're going on to with the Chris King. I should go back with that one. Same with the DT Swiss. The DT Swiss hub runs the SYNC ceramic bearings in the 180 hub. This one's running an Enduro steel bearing hub or bearings in the hub. The next one we go on to would be the very well-known or very well-regarded Chris King Buzz. Premium bit of kit. Like I love Chris King stuff. It's been around for a long time with the Marathon bike industry as well and their headsets are beautiful as well. They use something called a ring drive. It's a very different system. How this one works is that it has angular cut engagements. So this one has a 45, they are teeth but 45 engagements. So it's a very clever system. Maintenance-wise is fantastic. They run a particular Chris King oil on the ring drive so you don't wanna bang a load of grease in there. It will actually skip and slide forward. When you're doing servicing on a Chris King hub though, realistically it's gonna have to be done, I would say, in a store. It's not one that you would do at home. You need tooling to remove the hub shell. So with the Chris King hub out of all of the wheels we've got in front of us, it's not a problem but it's something that needs to be addressed like the extra light hub has a micro adjust lock ring on the left-hand side. The disc brake lock ring will not go over or the micro adjust ring if you will. So what has to happen is when you get the brand new hub set or if you're swapping obviously rotors on a regular basis for any reason, I don't know why you might do that but in your case we're doing testing and so forth. You have to remove this first, install your disc brake and then you obviously put on your micro adjust afterwards. You can fuck up, yeah you did. And the reason being was is when you've adjusted it you didn't get enough clearance and it was binding. So as you see it doesn't sit through. We have to make sure that you use either the Shimano or Galfa style lock rings, not the internal spline lock ring that uses a normal cassette tool. But let's be honest, once you've got your rotor on most people are not gonna be taking your rotor on and off all the time. You'll suppose the quirkiness of the King hub. So the I-45 has 45 engagements as we were just talking. The Marathon bike hubs have a lot more, 72 engagements and that's where that Chris King buzz comes from. Handmade bearings, everything's made in the States. These are steel version. You don't do an upgrade kit you'd purchase the hub as a Chris King ceramic I-45. So you either buy it as a Chris King standard steel which most people would do or you would purchase an I-45 ceramic. The next one is white industries and this is the one Aaron was referring to at the start of this video. It's got like a metal sound to it. So the white industries has a 48 tooth engagement. It runs a three pool system. They do have double teeth on each of the pools. You've got two little engagements on the ends. So you do end up with double locking per pool. Hub bearings on these, these are all Enduro. This is their high grade Enduro steel to remove the axle and the free hub body. Again, tooling is required. So you have a tiny two millimeter allen key that comes in through the porthole here. We have to extract the left hand micro adjuster and then we slide the whole thing out again. So again, a little bit more fiddly than if you were to purchase a DT Swiss hub which just pulls off. I mean, they are, they're beautiful hubs and they would probably be the closest type of competitor because obviously handmade in the States or that kind of stuff. I mean, the reason why I think you like this so much is just to anodize red as well. It's just a nice looking hub. You can get these in lots of different colors. They're a wicket purple. They do fantastic coloring. But so does Chris King. You can get them as in fantastic colors. Yeah, and I've had it in the past with the non-disprake version hub when you are extracting those little three tiny grub screws. If you get a lot of water in there because there's a steel screw, you do end up with corrosion happening in there. So if you don't keep on top of just having a good amount of grease, this little piece here does not slide out very easily because they have such a tight tolerance. That is dirty inside of there, even though it was brand new. That was quite tricky to slide off of there. So that's something to think about serviceability. When they're brand new, it's fantastic. Grease them up, they'll be perfect. But later on, if you haven't taken that off for a year or two, you might have to give it a bit of a persuasion. So after riding all these wheels for the past six months, some of the biggest things that I've noticed. I'm gonna start off with the extra lights because I was on these for quite a while. I own these. I went and tested all the other hubs and then came back to these and immediately I noted that responsiveness when climbing. However, the downside of the lightweight construction is the 32 tooth engagement and two-pole system, meaning after free pedaling and then reengaging the crank, you will notice a lack of responsiveness there with the extra lights. The white industries. Now, external to that really cool hub noise that we just talked about, I really like the aesthetics of this hub. The way it's been machined, the industrial look of the hub really hooks you in. And of course, it comes in different color schemes too, so you can pimp up your bike. And it should be noted with the creative carbon wheels, when you go to their custom section, you can select any particular hub and color that you like. With the Chris Kings, they also offer different color options. And I've always had this nostalgic feeling about the Chris Kings. As when I first was really going deep into road cycling between say 2010, 2012, everyone was talking about the envy wheels with the Chris King hubs. I didn't really know what they were talking about, but I heard it a lot at the time. In terms of general performance for everything, external to climbing where I'd say the extra lights win, for me, it would be a really close call between the Chris Kings and the DT Swiss. For me though, I like ease of use. I'm a pretty simple man. Many of you will know as well, I don't mind a bit of Swiss engineering. So I would choose the DT Swiss, but all in all, all these hubs are excellent. If you've got value from this video today, it's been a monster project. So I would really appreciate it. If you gave the video a like, helps the channel out and I'll catch you in the next one.