Stan’s Neo and Neo Ultimate Hubs
The Stan’s NoTubes company has been busy redesigning its hubs from the ground up over the last two and a half years. While its 3.0 hubs are perfectly serviceable, there were a few bits that could be improved, so Stan’s started from scratch to improve them.
There will be two levels of hubs that will come on Stan’s wheels (the hubs won’t be available separately). Both the Neo and the Neo Ultimate start off life as bar stock that is CNCd into shape and then, in the case of the Ultimate, further ‘hogged out’ to save weight and remove material wherever possible.
The freehub starts as a forging that is machined out. The Neo hub will feature four pawls, that engage simultaneously and give 10° of engagement. The Neo Ultimate, meanwhile, has six pawls (top left) that engage three at a time, giving 5° of engagement
The bearings are massively bigger now and a new barbed seal replaces the rather baggy O-ring of old. The hubs can still be broken down by hand, without tools. And the end caps no longer fall off!
The hubs feature interchangeable end caps and will come with QR and thru-axle caps in the box. They will come in Shimano and SRAM xD drivers, and yes, there’ll be Boost 148/110 hubs too.
Expect to see these hubs start coming through on Stan’s wheels by late summer/ early autumn.
Stan’s Bravo Wheels
The world of rims is getting wider, but Stan’s found (as did ENVE, as we’ll find out in another story) that there’s a point at which wider is no longer better. Stan’s reckons that it’s new Bravo wheelset sits at the sweet point of rim width, being 32mm external and 26.6mm internal.
The Bravo rim is shallower than many carbon rims – and this is because Stan’s reckons that deep carbon rims are too vertically stiff. As it puts it ‘it’s built to take a punch’ – and if you’d like to see quite how much of a punch – check out this video of the more XC Valor rim being smacked in the face:
Designed for tyres from 2.35 up to 2.5in, the Bravo has been extensively tested – most recently by Gee Atherton (who was racing it with a Flow sticker on it…). There will be two tiers of wheels available when they come out in July/August – a Neo hub level called ‘Team’ and a Neo Ultimate called the Pro. The base model will be $1575 and the Ultimate will be $1900. No UK pricing just yet. The Ultimate level ‘Pro’ wheel has triple butted spokes and the Ultimate hub. Weights will be around 1640g for the 27.5in Pro level.
And the good news? The wheel will come in 29, 27.5 AND 26in. It’s great to see Stan’s supporting the 50% of riders still on 26in wheels. And when we asked if there’ll be an aluminium, more affordable level rim of this type coming out, there was a lot of eye-darting and coughing. So we reckon you should tune back in to see what’s announced at Eurobike…
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I don’t know how hard the impact in the video is but building and using a rim that deflects to a point where the spokes get unloaded on a fairly regular basis will lead to spoke failure rather quickly.