This appears to be a run of the mill lightweight mountain bike wheel. It’s glossy and show-friendly, but it follows protocol with its fancy direct pull spokes and a standard splined freehub body to take your standard fancy gears of choice. Don’t be fooled. Inside that hub lies madness. No, wait, magnets. At a recent Taipei tradeshow Pinkbike got an enviable first look at Spank’s unreleased Mag-Drive hub.
For the uninitiated but interested, a bike’s drivetrain is almost always controlled by 3+ spring loaded pawls that rotate within a toothed collar in the rear hub, providing the forward engaging/backward freewheeling action that powers the bike and lets you coast. Notable exceptions like DT Swiss included, it’s still pretty rare for a rear wheel to not use pawls. Anyone who’s ever had to work on a freehub knows that pawls are both simple and a little irritating. I get grumpy fingers just thinking about the widgety bits. More importantly, for performance riders (and those of us who commute competitively) unnecessary friction and gaps in engagement are distracting and offensive, and a failed freehub can be devastating. All of these issues can come up in even newer wheels, and increase in likelihood with age and dirt and abuse. Spank, and a few other companies (like DT), are proposing that the opposing resistance of magnets can solve some of these problems.
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