NEW Industry Nine Hydra and 101 Hubs [Video]

Overview

Industry Nine makes some of the best mountain bike and road wheels on the market. Known for their high level of machining and aluminum spoke System chassis, these wheels are designed, manufactured, and assembled in the USA. Industry Nine is back again to stoke the fire with their all-new Hydra and 101 hubs. From the outside, the Hydra hubs looks almost identical to the previous generation Torch hubs. It's what happens inside the drive mechanism that makes the Hydra hubs special. The 101 lineup of hubs takes a no-nonsense approach, bringing a lower price point hubset to market with Industry Nine's legendary performance. Check it out!

THE NEW PHASE OF INDUSTRY NINE is the culmination of innumerable miles on the bike and hours in the shop. An evolution from previous Legacy and Torch drive systems, Industry Nine's new HYDRA drive is a project over two and a half years in the making. Hydra rewrites the rules with a monstrous leap to 690 points of engagement, or .52° between each engagement. The new Hydra drive system raises the bar on hub technology using an independently-phased six pawl, 115 tooth drivering.

The drivering inside the Hydra hubshell uses 115 teeth and is one of the key differences in this new drive mechanism

What's New?

The innovative new design utilizes a continually phased system, creating a procession of engagement points between pawl and drivering. The design utilizes the inherent flex of the axle to accomplish positive second, third or fourth pawl contact. Hydra also tempers uncontrolled axle and bearing movements conventional designs can’t mechanically limit, thus improving bearing life and decreasing resistance. Hydra offers consistent, reliable engagement without overloaded bearings, axles or hub shells. Hydra evolves the performance of Industry Nine's 2019 mountain and fatbike range in both premium System wheelsets and Classic hubs, including our steel spoke S-Series wheels. As always, riders can find their perfect adaptations with a universe of fitment, freehub bodies, hub and spoke colors, wheel models and sizes.

The drive mechanism on the freehub body uses 6 pawls loaded by leaf springs instead of coil springs found on Torch hubs

Check out the Industry Nine Ano Lab to design your very own custom wheelset

There are also a few smaller tweaks that might have previously gone unnoticed. The release of the new hub design gave Industry Nine the opportunity to update their end caps as well. With the original Torch hubs, one of their design flaws was that when you pulled off the end caps to service the hubs, the o-ring that sits inside each end cap had a high chance of tearing or ripping. Now with Hydra, they have updated the drive side end cap to hold a larger o-ring that is intended to be more durable. This is just a small change that certainly improves the quality of these wheels and customer experience. 

Another tip or trick we wanted to include in here is that you can actually tune the sound of your Industry Nine rear hub with what kind of freehub grease you are using inside the drive mechanism. For the loudest hub possible, use a lightweight chain lube to lubricate the driver mechanism, something like Maxima Chain Pro Lube or Finish Line Dry Chain Lube. If you aren't in to the loud ringing noise that you've heard from Industry Nine hubs, try Dumonde Tech Pro Freehub grease. Straight out of the box, Industry Nine uses all Dumonde Tech products to lubricate the freehub body, and their Pro Freehub grease will quiet the rear hub down a lot without any additional drag. Give it a try on your own Industry Nine wheels!

A redesigned drive side end cap uses a larger more durable o-ring and makes the end cap easier to remove

Dumonde Tech Pro Freehub Grease is a drive mechanism lube that will quiet down your new Hydra rear hub if that is your style 

To learn more about everything Industry Nine, check out our Industry Nine Inside Look as we check out their headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina

Confident and capable of cleaning the A-line yet budget-friendly to save up for a season of bucket list rides, the 101 hub stays true to Industry Nine's performance heritage. Featuring a dual phased-pawl drive mechanism accomplishing 90 points of engagements and 4° engagement by way of a six pawl driver and 45 tooth drivering, 101 takes a no-nonsense approach in welcoming riders to Industry Nine. Key specifications found on 101 read like those of hubs well beyond their asking price.

Other Features

Here are a few more of the standout features on the 101 hubset.
• High-load sealed cartridge bearings
• 15mm rear axle to fit all current freehub body options
• Lightning quick 4° engagement
• Service-friendly retained pawls actuated by durable leaf-springs
• A robust protection system using a complex radial lip seal and endcap proximity seals that aren't affected by bearing wear or preload
• Unified service parts across the range. The 101 hubset is machined, anodized and assembled entirely here in our Asheville, NC manufacturing facility. Ongoing investments in expanding CNC production capacity paired with increased manufacturing efficiencies are instrumental in bringing an all new high quality, high performance value option to riders.

Bringing the Industry Nine brand of quality and performance to more riders than ever, 101 will initially be offered as standalone Boost mountain hubsets in 28 or 32 hole options, ISO 6 bolt or Center Lock rotor fit, and HG, XD1, or Micro Spline freehub body options. Complete wheels will be available late spring. High engagement hubs in an innovative and affordable package. Welcome to 101.

To learn how to maintain and service your own Industry Nine hubs, check out our Mountain Bike How To

If you're one strange human and would like to read a transcript of the video above, continue reading below!

What's up guys, I'm Jeff from Worldwide Cyclery and today we are at the trailhead with Charlie from Industry 9 and we're gonna talk about all things i9 especially their new products. So right off the bat who is i9 charlie? So i9 is a small company started out of a machine shop in Asheville North Carolina. They were founded by Clint Spiegel out of a machine shop in about 2005 or 2006. There was always a lack for high engagement wheels that were really strong that could survive Pisgah National Forest and that's kind of where we got our start from and here we are today doing full wheel sets across the world. Yeah it's awesome I mean I9 to me has always been sort of an iconic brand because back in the day I saw their first set of wheels they sounded crazy they had a ton of engagement they were all colorful with aluminum spokes and just fancy anodized hubs and pretty impressive stuff. So let's dive into the timeline of the I nine wheel history. So the timeline of industry nine stuff. Legacy, torch, Hydra. legacy came out 2006, 2007. Torch was about 2013, and then new Hydra stuff came out 2019, earlier this year. So the biggest difference between legacy and torch. The Legacy was very hard to service, the bearings weren't that great, it was still our first try at it. There were a couple of things that we could have improved on with those and the torch kinda knocked a bunch of those out of the park with the serviceability and the bearing life on there. So torch to Hydra, biggest difference there the same thing again we saw a need for improvement in both the bearing life and the resistance we had a little bit higher resistance compared to some of the other competitors and we figured we might as well get the engagement at the same time with those. So Hydra did solve some interesting problems and was a significant upgrade so let's dive into that.

So the torch hubs were pretty impressive, I loved them, I never really had any complaints. Some of my all-time favorite wheels. That is a pretty challenging thing to make even better. Hydra - you guys feel like you did, you've got way more engagement going from 120 to 690 right and a few other noticeable things most notably other than the engagement is that actually just dragging the resistance on it. So talk about how you guys achieved both of those things and why they were meaningful things to focus on fixing. Okay so with the the main point that we wanted to when we developed Hydra was we had bearing issue life we also had drag that was a little bit high through what we found out it's about 20% less with Hydra compared to torch I'm a couple of ways that we did this we used a much shallower Drive ring compared to the torch so if you compare those two you see that the teeth on the driving are actually much shallower also if you look really close and there's actually a leaf spring compared to a coil spring which has a more linear push on it so it's not quite doesn't quite slam it up into the pawl so horse up into the two so hard and not quite as much push to get it up in there so that helped with the resistance quite a bit. It also made it a lot easier to work on as well since you don't have that a tiny little microscopic spring yes and the pawl springs from what we found out have do not come out randomly and eject across the room you have to go crawl around the floor to try to find them yeah it's gotten much easier on that sense it's cool. So interesting thing, you said the number of teeth on hydras how many? So the drive ring will have 115 teeth on it compared to 60 on the torch. So 115 teeth with 690 points of engagement and that's because we use a single pawl engagement. so when there's no torque on the system these pawls will spit as the system itself spins so you get one pawl will engage at a time as soon as you go to apply torque which is gonna be pedaling in this case you will actually have there's a little flex built into the system and you will actually use the engaged pawl as a fulcrum and it will rotate two to three pawls behind it into engagement so you're never driving the system on one just one pawl. The pawls and the driver are both made out of heat-treated a2 tool steel so they're very very hard. But just to give a little bit more force on it we like to have not just one point of contact and I mean points of engagement going from 120 to 690, 120 is already a ton that's like when you had that amount of play you have in your crank so when you're you know backpedaling a little bit on a technical climb or when you just go and write out and get out of the corner snapping down there there was like the ever so slight a bit of play and now there's basically nothing 0.5 degrees. So that's more or less infinite engagement at that point, anything pretty much as close as you can get using a mechanical system. And then also some minor upgrades on the end caps the way those are designed just keep it more sealed yeah so you know going back to the bearing life issue that we did have with some customers, we wanted to find a way to keep more foreign debris out of the system itself. So we actually changed the end cap around a little bit, we took the teflon seals out and now if you’re dirt, water, whatever else you may want to get into the hub it has to go across two walls to get it now and it's just designed to keep it out of there a little bit more. 

We're gonna drop a link below in the video description to a blog post. It has a lot more images of all this stuff and sort of goes into the more nitty gritty. Also check out industry 9’s YouTube channel. They made a bunch of videos about the sound differences and all the other crazy technical nerdy aspects of these things. So definitely check that out and let's see, let's talk about the whole lineup now all right so lineup wise you guys have always offered I guess starting with mountain bike wheels but now offering quite a bit of stuff. oh I've always been a huge fan of the enduro 305's that's my current favorite set. What's the most popular thing you guys offer? The most popular stuff had been the enduro 305 it does a little bit of everything from we've seen guys on downhill bikes use it to trail bikes to even heavier cross-country riders and pick the 305 we do have that available in carbon as well so to be the 310 so it's basically the same rim just a touch wider but of course constructed out of carbon still same chassis and hub on it we do offer a couple of configurations at 32 and a 24 hole in those so a little bit lighter a little bit more compliant on the 24 hole versus the more burly 32 hole as well. 305 is the actual internal width of the rim right right thirty point five millimeters and three ten would be thirty one so yeah that kind of helps people gauge what's for what and then also XC wheels downhill wheels Road cyclocross all the above. The number scheme will be the same for about all for example we have the grade three hundred for the downhill wheels, the ultralight 235 for the cross-country wheels and that kind of goes back and forth to the gravel line as well. So something for everyone, a ton of wheels to choose from. The other cool thing which has always been one of my favorite things is the custom colors you guys do on your website you have the ano lab. We've done a ton of custom builds, I always work with you guys to put some cool stuff together, I have on my own bike some turquoise rear hub black front hub couple mixed in turquoise spokes. so ano lab custom colors what is the number of colors offered so we offer 11 different colors on the Ano lab too you can go through and you can select the color and you can go select each individual spoke you can select the valve you can select the hub color as well so there's many options we can't even calculate the total amount of options with all the colors and all the spokes in the wheel so there's there's quite a bit of them. But 11 colors to choose from. Awesome good stuff let's dive into some common questions about the new Hydra versus torch all right Charlie most common question about Hydra versus torch as a sound how does it sound?

Yes that's a very common one that we get quite a bit. Torch has always been known for being very loud too based on how much grease how much oil you put in the hub when you service them. Hydra has been you know like we talked about earlier where it's not an actual such a hard throw to get into the engaged position that it is a little bit quiet with the more engagement points the sound is a little bit more subtle and it hums a little bit more. so it's not quite the same sense, seems quieter right off the bat I mean just a different sound as well I mean that was something I always thought was a little funny a lot of people complained about industry 9 wheels being too loud and I kind of thought like that's like complaining that your Ferrari is too loud. That's a good sound that makes me feel joy in my heart but I guess some people didn't like it. So Hydra you can make it quieter with a particular type of grease you recommended? From the factory the hubs are gonna come built with the Dumont Tech Pro X grease if you want them a little bit quieter you can put a little bit more grease in there and puts them around the drive ring as well if you want it a little bit more loud when when you go to service your hubs you can use the Dumont tech freehub oil instead of the grease and make it a little bit more loud that way. Don't use anything other than those two lubricants you just mentioned correct correct it thicker grease can cause a lot of problems yeah so fair warning don't put thick of grease in there let's show you guys some sound comparisons right now

So the next most common question: Can your existing torch wheelset be upgraded to the Hydra internal mechanism? Unfortunately these cannot. So there you go, can't upgrade it, sell your wheels on pinkbike buy & sell, and get a fresh set of hydras, plenty of options there. Price points are starting at $1355 - based on the color that you select. That stock color is gonna be the thirteen fifty five and that'll be all black and then the wilder you get with it the more the price will go up. Sounds good, well make sure you guys check the link below to the blog post where you can see a lot more about this stuff, check out industry 9s website as well and their YouTube channel like I mentioned, please share this with your mountain bike buddies who were interested in super fancy high-end wheels and we'll see you guys in the next one.