In case you hadn’t heard, the Hive is a recent collection of three great cycling brands: e*thirteen, Chub and Revl (road components). The busy bees at the Hive showed us their expanding line-up at Interbike which left us suitably impressed.
As you can see from the photo above, Chub hubs are essentially hollow, thin-walled carbon hubs with aluminum bearing carriers. This makes the hubs very light yet stiff in construction. The only thing missing from the line-up (but coming soon) is the rear cassette hub – word is the folks at Chub want to get things exactly right before they release new product. At the moment Chub offers both 20mm and QR9 hubs. The photo below shows one of the hub cutaways up close.
At e*thirteen, two fundamental things are happening. First, the line of chain retention devices has been simplified – the company is removing redundant items that currently overlap. Secondly, e*thirteen will produce each style of retention device in a high performance alloy version and a economic version that works just as well but is made of chrome-moly and steel bolts. Easy.
trek7k says: I was stoked on the seat tube mount chain retention devices. The bottom-bracket mounted XCX is a must have for 1×9 XC riders but I could see the seat tube mounted version being a good option as well.
And did I not mention that e*thirteen is also making one totally awesome-looking crank? Yup that’s right, a crank to go along with their killer retention devices. This crank has a unique spindle that should keep everything straight and most importantly, the interface on this unit will not wear out like others you may have used. The polygon interface contacts the crank arm with 100% of it’s surface area unlike star-shaped spindles.
As you can see from the photo above, the spindle nearly fills the bottom bracket shell. The bearings are housed in the bearing cups and a special tool is provided to tighten the cups.
Check out these and more interesting products from the Hive if you get the chance. I’m sure you’ll be impressed too!
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Sep 29, 2010
Sep 29, 2010