All Things Bikes and Tacos! (...and every vehicle imaginable)

Love mine! I went for the loud beehive rear hub. It's been trouble free for nearly a year now.

 

Explain this to a dummy? I kinda like some noise from the hubs, but I really like efficiency.

 

I went for a ride the other day and right when my phone said I had been riding for 45 minutes and was 4 miles from my truck it started pouring rain, to say that I got wet would be an understatement, lol.

 

I noticed the word silent and was like "awesome", then I read up (I'm not good with directions of things) and saw $500 . I'd LOVE to have another silent hub. My old (like, nearly retro bike old) Canondale had one that is still holding (my wife rides it) after being converted to 1x10 and I miss it so much. Unfortunately (or maybe it's normal?), I've grown a bit more abusive on my new steed so I'm sure I'll have to replace the one that came on this bike eventually. When I do, I'll be looking at something silent... even this DT swiss stocky is pretty loud for my tastes but I can hear the chris king and i9 buzz from a mile away!

 

They use magnets in place of springs on the pawls themselves, which means you can pop the hub apart (super easy), pop in a different set of pawls in place (again super easy since there’s no springs), put in some oil or light grease, done. People have had issues with grease since the magnets sometimes don't overpower the stickiness of the grease, which is easily fixed with light grease or oil. Grease is quieter, oil louder.
The two sets of pawls are designed to either make noise, or not. The silent ones have the associated benefit of less drag as well.

Here are the two different pawls.



And how the fit in:



Here’s a good review :
https://nsmb.com/articles/project-321-hubs-reviewed/

I like louder hubs, and these make a really cool sound. Not like CK or i9, different and not quite as loud.
The silent ones a really are damn near silent. No way you’d hear them on trail.

 

The new i9 hydra hubs are damn quiet with the dumonde tech free hub grease. I am very pleased with my 305 enduro wheel set! And the engagement.... instantaneous.

 

Exactly the explanation/lesson I was looking for

I too like loud-ish, but not obnoxious hubs. Was leaning towards I9/DT/Hope but may need to look into these some more.

 

Sprags do eventually fail and they are quite heavy (onyx rear hub is 450 grams, I9 Hydra rear is 285 grams). Yeah when a sprag goes it's gone, you are coasting and it doesn't lead up to a failure it will just engage until it no longer does. a sprag's means for engagement is binding afterall.
I worked for I9 from 06'-16' and the company's owner got into making a high engagement hub off of a contract that DiaComp/Cane Creek gave him to R&D a high engaging hub in the early 2000's, that uses a one way bearing not entirely unlike a sprag but a bit different and it worked excellent until it didn't when the tolerance opened up over time.
The company I work for now has done POF testing on a lot of hubs (to be fair, OE level, asian made hubs from various vendors) and the two things that have a certain finite life tend to be systems that bind or wedge and magnets. magnets change polarity over time, or weaken and the spring effect from opposing poles gets too slow to engage between points and cause skipping or partial engagements.

I think @ridge has a good point about pedaly riders VS coasty riders, and I think Onyx hubs are something that would shine for disciplines that require gate starts like DH, BMX, Slalom etc...

 

Sounds like you’re a knowledgeable fellow in the hub/wheel arena.

To piggy back off your last comment about onyx shining in gate related disciplines. What would be the best suited hubs for pedaly riders? I definitely fall into that category.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I was aware that neodymium magnets only lost 1% of their strength over ten years and reversing polarity would require a pretty substantial magnetic field applied to the pawls themselves.
Can you drop some info on what you noticed in the tests (POF rate, time, etc)? Or how magnetic forces changed in mechanical systems? Really curious if you guys tested the p321 hubs since they’re the only magnetic pawl hub I know of.

 

While we’re still talking hubs....ceramic vs steel bearings....discuss

@abacall @ItsSadButDrew

 

@abacall lots of thing have magnetic fields in our electronic age. Tune also made a short lived mag spring system that almost made OEM with ENVE... and many OE mfg's offer it and you'll understand that the lack of their availability stems from industry distrust. I don't have data for POF rate, time etc but I know that they had less lives than regular springs.

ceramic vs steel: easy to explain yet hard to trust, ceramic is harder than steel. MOST ceramic bearings are ceramic balls in steel races. ceramic balls need less lube due to heat build up so that = lower resistance. ceramic is also way harder than steel so that makes the races wear faster than necessary. if you go ceramic make sure you go with a full ceramic cartridge (ceramic races + bearings) or you will have an item initially "better" that wears exponentially faster.
steel on steel wears at the same rate so there is a longer wear life if maintained well. Also all ABEC ratings aren't equal. Some brands make I.S. standards with lower ABEC ratings but have better seals or higher tolerance races which aren't taken into ABEC consideration. Enduro ABEC5 < FKD ABEC3.

Id prefer a solid abec 5 full steel bearing. roughly same weight, gets better with wear as opposed to worse, cheaper when maintenance is due.

 

In my early days at I9 we sold drive rings and freehubs to P321, and made lefty front hub parts for them. They make excellent stuff! They are a reputable brand selling good things as far as i know. I have no experience with their magnetic hubs specifically, I have seen testing on an asian catalog part's data after testing... and while that is a shitty vague answer Im in no place to say anything particular to what p321 makes

 

Which have the best bearing life to acceptable engagement ratio? i like a 3degree or better hub but noe aside from I9 there is bontrager, race face and a few others playing the game.

 

The DT's that came on my Yeti are super quiet. After riding quiet hubs, I'll never go back to noise makers. I'd rather hear my tires on the trail.

 

Thanks for that. As far as reversing polarity, I believe the magnet would need a force greater than its own in order to reverse polarity. I’m just tying to understand when such a strong magnetic force would be applied to a hub.

I’ve never used ceramic bearings. But solid steel bearings with good seals are great. The p321 hubs use Japanese ezo bearings, and those seem to have really good reviews. No issues with them yet.

I do remember that their partnership with i9 is how they got started. Super cool you were around for that. I bought into the magnetic pawls idea due to ease of maintenance. When I had to service them it was super easy to pop them out, clean, re-lube, put them back.

 

This reminded me of the bottom bracket I switched to late last year. I didn’t go full ceramic for the very reasons you state (and of course the exorbitant cost), but did decide to test durability of the IRD scramjet BB. They use a single ceramic ball with the remainder in the bearings being steel on steel races. Their claim being that the single ceramic ball isn’t enough to prematurely wear the races but serves to clean any collected debris by crushing due to the hardness over the other steel bearings.

It seemed logical and the price point wasn’t so painful that it was worth a long term test for me. I put them on two of my hardest working bikes and they seem to be holding up really well to the hours of use.

The other thing you should keep in mind about magnets is their susceptibility to losing magnetism from hard impacts. Whack a magnet with a hammer and it will lose its magnetism.

Not that you’re going to hit those pawls with a hammer when servicing but if one drops from the bench or your hub takes a hard enough hit; they’d be worth inspecting.

 

So, I may be wrong, and please someone correct me if I am, but the only ways in which a magnet such as those in P321 hubs loses its strength are: heat above 176* (for neodymium), hard oblique impacts (such as repeated hammer strikes, not just dropping), and exposure to magnetic fields (of opposite polarity) stronger than the existing strength of the magnet itself.
Don’t see how any of those things can happen to a hub under normal operating conditions.

*This is just from spending a bit of time researching. I’m by NO MEANS qualified beyond that to speak to the mechanics and physics of magnetism beyond what I have read.

 

Yeah, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that if one takes a hit bad enough to effect the magnets in the hub, or enough heat to do the same...... Well they probably have bigger problems and aren’t gonna care about the hub or what’s inside.

 

Happy sunday bois!