HUBS HAVE TO GET STARTED

We have been making really good prgress on material and rim methods, hubs and bearing selection is the next area of development. Genrally at Zipp we begin with a clean sheet of paper and assume we need to redesign everything to get the absolute performance. In the case of hubs, the Zipp hubs are essentially built from scratch including our own rathchet ring, springs and pawls. Generally in the industry hub manufacturers would purchase these parts. For Flash-Point wheels we are not trying to out-engineer everything, what we know to be important is to deliver affordable performance and exceptional value.
As a result, we have actively been researching hub builders in USA, Taiwan, Italy, UK, France and even in South America for some time now. It is very important that the cost is low but performance high, bearing quality and durability exceptional, yet not be uncompetitive pricewise. As difficult as it has been for us to use a very expensive material in carbon to build affordable wheels, we discover that building high quality hubsets at an affordable price is equally challenging. With numerous samples of product here and numerous bearings specs involved, we will be logging mileage on all of these every way we can to try and make some determinations.