# WI hub failure



## Trails4Two (May 12, 2008)

Well, I guess we finally achieved the benchmark of "hard riders". Last weekend our White Industries hub exploded. While out in Furita, we had just finished a climb and were pedaling easily along a flat when suddenly the cranks started spinning freely. I thought we had dropped a chain, but it turned out that our freehub was spinning equally smoothly in both directions. I opened it up at home and found that all three pawls had broken. the freehub body where the pawls mount was distorted from pressure, and the drive teeth ring in the hub shell was cracked. It is a 2006 hub, and we are a 300lbs team that is usually very easy on equipment (one broken chain and one XT freehub in 9 years of off-road tandeming). There are some mitigating factors: we now live in an area that can be very hard on freehubs - the rocks and trails lend themselves to stressing drive components. I have not properly maintained the hub - if I had, I might have caught a missing pawl earlier and saved it. We are now working with Alex and White Ind to decide about repair/replace options. We are also considering a King (if we can find one...) or DT Swiss replacement. Does anyone have experience with the DT 540 tandem hub?

Here's pics of the parts


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## PMK (Oct 12, 2004)

All of our tandems roll on DT Swiss hubs.

Our Cannnondale split the hub length wise from a spoke hole. This is a DT Hugi based drive in I believe a Cannondale machined hub. Regardless, the hub had small flange diameters and failed from a spoke hole.

This same hub lost drive early on. The bike was 10 years old and had low miles when we bought it. I should have cleaned and lubed the drive rings so they could slide easily. I believe the Molykote grease being old was a bit thick and slowed the engagement of the rings. I'm certain I could have cleaned and reused the drive rings and been fine, but for $15 or so I got two new ones and a set of spares.

Now all the hubs get and occasional clean and lube of the drive rings with Phil Wood oil.

So far no issues. Combined we are 375, and abuse the you know what out of these hubs, even the Co-Mo road tandem sports 36 speeds with a stump pulling great granny bailout chainring. Don't ask, long story involving close ratio cassettes.

BTW, DT's on the front also.

I have never seen a max torque to failure test of various hubs. There are some good hubs available. The DT with drive rings must rate high on account of the drive contact area.

PK


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## reamer41 (Mar 26, 2007)

The King hub has been very reliable for me. $$ but worth it.


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## Trails4Two (May 12, 2008)

King would be my first choice, but they are 2-4 weeks behind minimum right now. I don't' want to lose what's left of Spring!


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## reamer41 (Mar 26, 2007)

Check with Aspire VeloTech on the web. I think they actually stock a wide variety of King hubs and parts.


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## Trails4Two (May 12, 2008)

Ended up going with DT 540 today. It's definitely a heavier hub than the White but I don't mind extra weight as long as it holds up. It should be built up next week, then we'll try it out. Only time will tell how it holds up, but I like the design much better than a three-pawl system.


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## TandemNut (Mar 12, 2004)

Chris' experience was enough to finally make me check into the rear hub on our Fandango demo.
Having heard a couple of "skreaks" on two recent rides, and having always felt that this hub felt "softer" than other WI hubs we have, I opened it up last night for a look-see.
WI's excellent instructions can be found here:
http://whiteind.com/images/REAR_HUB_ADJUSTMENT.pdf
Has pictures and everything, too!
Here's what I found:


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## TandemNut (Mar 12, 2004)

(cont'd)
Please forgive my lack of photography skills.
The pawls appear to be different.
The longest (bottom) pawl is the standard one.
The 2nd longest (middle) appears to be a standard pawl, but bent slightly (skreak...)
The 3rd is shortest, and is not broken. It is a different pawl.
The freehub body shows some indication of deformation where the pawls fit into the round slots. This could be from overloading a single or two pawls. This may also explain the bent pawl.
I replaced the freehub body with one from a new hub (helps to have them sitting on the shelf...)
The teeth in the hub shell appear to be unaffected.
The bearings in the hub felt fine as well; they should easily provide at least another year or so of use.
It took longer to dissassemble the hub than the 30 seconds or so to replace the pawls and springs.
Also noticed minor side play in the front hub. WI's new axle system makes adjustment wonderfully simple and quick. Neat design!
We've been spoiled by these hubs in that we've never worried much about maintenance. This experience shows WI's hubs, while having a great record for reliability, should be maintained regularly in order to continue to provide tandem-adequate performance. I recommend any team riding these hubs to order a couple of sets of replacement pawls and springs and keep them on the shelf for annual or similar service intervals.
Now I have to figure out how to find the time to service a whole fleet of WI hubs.


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## PMK (Oct 12, 2004)

TandemNut said:


> (cont'd)
> We've been spoiled by these hubs in that we've never worried much about maintenance. This experience shows WI's hubs, while having a great record for reliability, should be maintained regularly in order to continue to provide tandem-adequate performance. I recommend any team riding these hubs to order a couple of sets of replacement pawls and springs and keep them on the shelf for annual or similar service intervals.


Good advice Alex.

FWIW, I would say this is good advice for all the rear hubs that can be serviced. Exploding a drive is attention grabbing and let's you wonder how much it would hurt to whack you knee or the stem or frame.

As said before, we run DT's on all our tandems, both road and mountain. This makes keeping a spare set of drive rings and springs a no brainer (about $20 or so). Like the WI these are not difficult to accomplish routine service of the drive system. So I try and clean/relube a couple times per year.

This is worth getting done.

If you don't do the work yourself, make certain the shop is very familiar on how to accomplish the work. In the past I have seen others stranded (on singles) because they took it to the shop and the shop either used to much grease or didn't get things together correct.

PK


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## clj2289 (Jan 2, 2010)

*should I be worried?*

Alex,

Is there anything I should do, I am pretty sure that I have same hub on my Fandango.

Thanks,
Chris Judd
Tallahassee


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## Trails4Two (May 12, 2008)

Alex, can you think of any reason there would be different pawls in there? I can't imagine that working to benefit the durability of the system. The more I look at it the more a full engagement system like the King or DT makes sense to me. Of course for the first four years on the White hub I didn't have a reason to consider it.


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## TandemNut (Mar 12, 2004)

Trails4Two said:


> Alex, can you think of any reason there would be different pawls in there? I can't imagine that working to benefit the durability of the system. The more I look at it the more a full engagement system like the King or DT makes sense to me. Of course for the first four years on the White hub I didn't have a reason to consider it.


I want WI to have the opportunity to look at the internals and provide their feedback before I make any assumptions about it. 
Also, it would appear that one of the longer pawls is bent, which means that at some point, it may have engaged by itself (since the others aren't bent). We have cranked pretty hard on this hub, and the noise I heard twice is likely to have been that pawl bending, which means that even one pawl is pretty strong, Two pawls are probably what we've been riding on most of the time, and three pawls would be the extra margin that makes these hubs last as long as they do.


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## TandemNut (Mar 12, 2004)

Trails4Two said:


> Alex, can you think of any reason there would be different pawls in there? I can't imagine that working to benefit the durability of the system. The more I look at it the more a full engagement system like the King or DT makes sense to me. Of course for the first four years on the White hub I didn't have a reason to consider it.


Chris,
Most of the accounts of these hubs failing includes some reference to a funny noise or feel in the hub at least once or twice before the failure occurred. With that in mind, I'd say treat it like any other component on a tandem mountain bike: be aware of the normal performance/sound/feel of the component, and if you experience anything out of the ordinary, look into it asap.

I must say, cleaning and inspecting the tandem regularly does a lot towards avoiding all sorts of failures. For example: While servicing our black Fandango recently (the original test frame we've been riding for the past 14 months) I found that 3 of the 5 outer chainring bolts were loose. Now this is especially irritating because I make it a point of loctiting (blue) all chainring bolts on assembly. Not sure if some of the chain cleaning solvents I use may have affected the loctite (not likely), or, in my late very night/early am hurry to assemble the bike for a test run the following morning I neglected to loctite the bolts (more likely),. Either way, the end result of such a failure isn't ever going to be good. Same goes for everything on any bike; Over the years I've found broken spokes, loose bolts, even found a loose rotor once just during the cleaning/inspection.

With the excellent reliability records most tandem mtb components have now, its' easy to forget just how much abuse the components on a tandem are exposed to, even with smooth, skilled riders (not us). Things like this serve to remind us that we're subjecting these parts to stresses on the high end of their design criteria, and as such, we should be vigilant about inspections and maintenance on them. (stepping off soapbox now...)


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## Trails4Two (May 12, 2008)

Fair answer. I'm not trying to bash White at all. Their hubs have worked great for a lot of teams and I'm sure they will continue to do so. I can completely understand the wisdom of replacing pawls and springs with some regularity: they have to take a lot of stress. My concern is the distortion of the metal in the freehub body where the pawls seat. That showed up on both of ours. Once that happens, you would need to replace the body quickly. Unless all the sockets distort equally you are in effect creating different length pawls as each pushes back into the distortion a different amount. Like yours, I think we blew one pawl last year sometime and were riding on two for a while. On the hub's last ride we blew another one and still rode a couple of mile of technical singletrack before the last one gave out.

Hindsight has taught me what a snapping pawl sounds like: to me it sounds like a chain issue. similar to the sound when a chain doesn't seat fully on the cassette, then snaps down when under pressure. A sort of loud pop.

EDIT: I also want to be very clear to all on the forum that I appreciate and depend on the work that Alex and other off-road tandem dealers do to find bikes and parts that can stand up to what what we do to them. Having called a few manufacturers over the last week, I begin to see what a very small niche market we are and how difficult it might be to get help from them on devising tandem worthy parts


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## PMK (Oct 12, 2004)

Alex, in regards to finding the loose chainring bolts, even with Loctite applied, I doubt the loosening was related to your assembly.

I notice many times that the parts we use see little in regards to proper seating of the fasteners.

With the machined or stamped items, the edges see little deburring or chamfering. When the fasteners are installed and torqued, the head seats on the thin bur. With use this minimal bearing surface is worn letting the joint loosen.

Additionally, not all of the fasteners we use are high quality, and some may stretch, take a permanent set and tend to loosen.

PK


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## TandemNut (Mar 12, 2004)

Trails4Two said:


> EDIT: ... Having called a few manufacturers over the last week, I begin to see what a very small niche market we are and how difficult it might be to get help from them on devising tandem worthy parts


Or even getting them to return phone calls


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## clj2289 (Jan 2, 2010)

*Thanks Alex*

Thanks for your reply, Alex. I'll give the machine a good once over.

Best,
Chris


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