Wheelbuilding / Wheel Building / Wheel build help

Hi sent you a pm about pictures and more detail on the tubeless carbon rims.
I have used hope for years and so have my mates and never seen cracks like them !

I've seen few cracks on messengers bikes. Ride it all year, never clean it sort of bikes.
Still hope honored every one of them.
Hope are still nice affordable hubs.
I used to not like their hubs for various reasons but they seemed to up the game recently.
Moral of a story is that bad batch of products can happen to any brand.
Let's not get me started on Enve :)

Hope are still nice affordable hubs.

I still use them on other wheels and I am happy to do so. Trouble is, on this build a hub failure means several thousand pounds down the drain, a holiday ruined and potentially a few hundred miles to walk back to the airport!

At the moment, it's looking like a straight fight between White Industries and Velo Orange, if Velo Orange are able to get back to me and confirm the axle's steel not ali.

Yep... very annoying... although there are still plenty around

Why not?

None of the people I know who build them have ever had any problem with them. As I said, in the past I built dozens of PRO 2, PRO 3 and Mono RS and never had a single one failing. There is no reason why Hope shells would be weaker than any other alloy shell on the market. They do extensive heat treatments to make sure the alloy is sound

Another entirely different option is to high polish a shimano hub shell.

'Dozens' is not a sample size I am happy to rely upon, given the numerous instances of catastrophic shell failures on Hope hubs, the evidence for which is clear to see from the pictures above. If you chose to ignore other people's experiences and seek to rely only upon the basis of your own tiny sample, then that's your choice, but I'm not going to follow suit.

Saying that 'There is no reason why Hope shells would be weaker than any other alloy shell on the market' is, with respect, utter bollocks. If that is correct then all alloy hub shells have equal strength, and the design of the hub shells is irrelevant, which is patently not true.

That did cross my mind, but doing it myself would be a massive PITA and organising someone else to do it would probably end up being nearly as bad. Velosolo stopped doing polished Shimano hubs due to the grief they had trying to source them.

White industries, royce, shimano xt ,756 hubs are your choice for silver disc brake hubs with a steel axle and shells that never crack. You can still buy silver xt m756 hubs in 32h. Tough as old boots and while stocks are limited they are not that limited the last time i checked. I know a good metal polisher wyatt polishing in thetford. The hub has to come apart that easy then cleaned up before reassembly also easy.

White industries or royce hubs have steel axles. Both are perfect.

Hadn't thought of Royce, not sure why. Probably never associated them with disc hubs. The Royce website is truly awful - I'll see if Cliff will disclose some top secret secrets like how much he charges for the damned things!

another option if you want something thats truly indestructible would be Phil wood???
Not cheap, but in the long run, in a situation described above would surely pay off.
Over built, beautiful polish.

@ugosantalucia

Care to elaborate on what is it that homebuilders do to brake flanges????

The thing thats bad about Hope is that failure mode seems to be exclusive to them. Shimano produce maybe 1000x more hubs and all you see from them is pics of 10 yo touring hubs that are knacked.
A Google picture search of "cracked hubs" seems to give results that are c. 50% Hope hubs cracking in ways no other hub does.

Royce website is awful but his hubs are not. £347 for the rear hub and £252 for the front. However you will known the name of the man responsible for them.

Over built, beautiful polish.

Don't know if Phil was beautiful, but he certainly wasn't Polish. 'Murrican, no?

Don't know if Phil was beautiful, but he certainly wasn't Polish. 'Murrican, no?

It's a little known fact that he changed his name from Filip Wodzianka when he arrived at Staten Island :)

Getting a phil cassette hub though could take a long time.

Phil definitely was a beauty.Polish ,I'm not sure. But it's possible;)

I should have suspected a deeper, hidden history to Phil Wood & Co.

Thinking about building a 27.5 wheelset for my nature boy disc, with alfine 8 rear and dynamo front, what rims?

Loaded touring or not. Velocity blunt 35 or the ss rims are a favourite.

bikepacking at best, and im light

I thought Hope's line on hub failures was that they buy in their billets, and some small percentage of these have flaws that will result in the hub failing at some point.

To be honest I don't think it's that big of an issue to do it or have it done.

I will try no to be overly sensible, but if it's either

several thousand pounds down the drain, a holiday ruined and potentially a few hundred miles to walk back to the airport

Or

£347 for the rear hub

Or a black £25 hub that fits the bill. I would probably pick the latter and try to avoid it in my vacation pictures. ;)

Seen a cracked royce flange in the flesh... the guy was not supposed to build it radial, but being a 20 holes hub, one would expect it to be an option...

It seems to me that my sample size is more representative of a few photos on the web of which we know very little... the large crack might be the result of a four feet jump with a bad landing... people on mountain bikes do crazy stuff with their bikes.