The bearings spacing on most cassette hubs is no different from that of a freewheel hub. With the exception of Shimano and Mavic and a few small makers, all freehubs have the hub bearings under the flanges, more or less. As long as the axle is properly designed, that is not a problem.
The problem with most freewheel hubs were the thin axles. They were designed for 4-speed and 115 mm spacing. With that short overhang, no problem. Then they added another 5 mm on the drive-side for 5-speed, and it was getting marginal. Then they added another 6 mm to use 6-speed, and the design no longer worked. They now had more than twice the lever as before, yet kept the diameter of the axle the same. It's surprising that it worked as well as it did! Adding grooves in the axle on both sides made the problem worse. (Who needs to adjust their hub on both sides? Maxi put the grooves on the non-drive side only, so you adjusted only that side.) There are plenty of freewheel hubs that don't break axles. Don't conclude from a poor execution that the entire concept is flawed. Cassette hubs have their own design problems. The biggest one is that the bearings under the cassette have to be relatively small. Jan Heine Editor Bicycle Quarterly http://www.bikequarterly.com Follow our blog at http://janheine.wordpress.com/ On Sunday, April 14, 2013 11:22:59 PM UTC-7, Cyclofiend Jim wrote: > But, I'm not real keen on going back to the narrow bearing spacing from > the freewheel days. (Bent waaay too many axles back then.) > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en-US. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
