Rear hubs ^{how to make a strong, versatile rear wheel}

Phil Wood freewheel hubs and IRD freewheels.  HUH?!?

Folks, this is how you build a strong, nearly dishless wheel using modern components.

First, start with a freehub.  Freehubs have a distinct advantage over other hub designs: a third bearing built into the freewheel body.  Figure 1 is a cut-away drawing of a freehub.  The third bearing, shown in green, is the reason that freehubs, of any sort, make older two bearing, freewheel hubs obsolete, period. 

Have a look at the drawing and imagine that the green bearing is not there.  That’s how freewheel hubs are designed.  That design worked fine for light loads like European racers riding on relatively smooth roads, supported by team cars with spare wheels.  But in the real world of irregular pavement and commuters who need to be to work on time that third bearing is brilliant and can’t be overlooked.  And even the cheapest freehubs have them.

Next, use a disc brake freehub.  The non drive side spoke flange on a disc brake rear hub is pushed to the center to make room for the disc mount.  The happy consequence of this is that the spoke flanges then become nearly symmetric.

Figure 2 shows that, on a disc brake rear hub, the non-drive-side spoke flange (shown in green) is closer to the center of the hub than it would be on a standard (nom-disc) hub.  When spoke flanges are roughly the same distance from the center of the hub, that symmetry makes the wheel less likely to be pulled out of true; the tension in the spokes will be more even.

But as sensible rear disc freehubs may be, some folks will reject them based on their looks.  For those people we offer a third argument for their use:

    fixed gearing

We make a fixed gear cog that bolts on to the disc brake mount.  The cog is available in two sizes: 16 and 18 teeth.  So instead of thinking of it as a disc mount, look at it as a fixed cog mount and think about how easy it would be to use this strong, stable wheel in fixed gear mode.