For brake fittings, since you mentioned it, there are even products that don’t react negatively with the fluid or hose material or bladder/seal material within caliper or lever; SRAM offers a DOT grease to be used with its DOT-fluid based braking systems on the coupling nut. My preferred setup for hubs like these is to remove the half the seals ( the ones that face the other bearing in each pair) from both the freewheel body and hub body bearings, then to use a generous fill of a suitable SFG in the space between the freewheel body bearings and another fill between the hub body bearings. A smaller quality of SFG is then used in the pawl cavity. This kind of setup usually weeps slightly but it considerably more weather-resistant than the usual arrangement, provided the SFG has the right kind of corrosion inhibitors in it. After a few thousand miles it may be prudent to add a little more SFG to the pawl cavity, but sometimes it isn't necessary, because SFG has worked its way in there from either the freewheel body or the hubshell.

Oh god. The things I’ve seen. First of all, do not spray ANYTHING on your disc rotors or calipers. I’m worried the world isn’t ready for disc brakes. Or bike shops aren’t doing their job educating consumers. Something is wrong here, that is for sure. I will also say I think road cyclists tend to be less concerned about maintenance things than mountain bike riders, maybe because the road bikes are a bit less dynamic so it’s not something many road cyclists obsess over in the way some MTB riders do, and the bikes have less tunable functionality in general. Most people just get on a road bike and go, at best maybe they pump their tires up every time to a specific pressure but even that is a long shot for most road riders. There are many different standards used by the different drivetrain makers – that’s mainly Shimano, SRAM and Campagnolo – as well as different ones for mountain bike and road bike freehubs. A ratchet design uses a pair of inter-connecting rings with teeth on their inner faces. James Huang / Immediate Media The other thing people could do more and benefit from immensely is lubricating your shift cables occasionally (and brake cables if you still have brakes that use cables). Shimano makes a great grease called SP41 that I like to use for assembly of new bikes; however, dripping a light oil like Triflow into the housing (most of the time there are ways to do this without disconnecting the cables) and under the BB cable guide if your bike is externally routed will improve shift feeling and performance considerably. It will even reduce friction on Campa's much touted CULT bearings which are quieted down by a parafin based oil. A neat solution but it's actually adding friction.....

Freehub vs freewheel

Ratchets might seem the obvious choice for high-stress applications, but if the angle of engagement is the priority, an offset pawl system may be better. Industry Nine uses six offset pawls in its Hydra freehubs which, combined with a 115-tooth drive ring, produce a huge 690 points of engagement, giving an angle of engagement of just over half a degree. In a pawl freehub, the engagement/disengagement mechanism consists of several sprung levers, called pawls, which are angled outward in one part of the bike’s hub and mesh with a toothed drive ring in the other part of the hub to transmit power to the wheel. In point of fact most cassette hubs are perfectly happy running in oil throughout; the main problem with it is that it tends to leak out. If you use the right semifluid grease then it has all the advantages of oil (keeping the seal lips wetted etc) with none of the disadvantages (it doesn't leak out at anything like the same rate). Since you can get semifluid greases with solid lubricants, extreme pressure additives and corrosion inhibitors, I suggest that you use those.

Chris King’s ratchet slides on angled splines in the hub rather than the straight in and out ones of DT Swiss’s hubs. You can also use Shimano-standard cassettes with 8, 9 or 10 speeds, but will need to fit a 1.85mm spacer on the inboard side of the cassette to fit, plus an additional 1mm spacer for 10-speed cassettes. Now we’ve had a look at the internals of the freehub, let’s turn to the outside of the freehub – the part on which your cassette mounts.Internal hub grease. This is with calcium hydroxide 5-10%, white solid lubricants 2-3.5%, & 2.5-4.1% bentonite, other additives and mineral oil. This grease is calcium-based for wash-resistance, and temperatures are not high. Pretty much anything will keep the parts inside well enough lubricated that they won't wear out too fast whilst freewheeling, but what will work best in any given hub will vary with the details of the particular hub that you have. You can use an oil provided the seals are good enough; if they are not good enough it will just come out and make a mess.

With Shimano’s move to 12-speed in its newest Dura-Ace Di2 R9200 groupsets, the components company has updated its Hyperglide freehub design.Bottomline is to first look at what the manufacturer recommends and try to understand why they do so. Then look at how you clean your bike and how that is affecting the lubrication of the freehub system. Our Freehub Grease is Exclusively used by: Industry 9 “Legacy”, “Hydra” and “101” hubs and Stan’s NoTubes, Hermes Sport and Hawk Racing. The ratchet’s teeth are angled, so when you’re freewheeling the angled faces of each ring slip over each other, sliding against the force from the springs. When you pedal, the flat faces mesh with one another to transmit your driving force to the wheel. After drive side bearing replacement i decided to put some drops of gl-4 synthetic gear oil into it to see how it would perform. Why, cause i had some sitting on the shelf taking up space. Specifically... Mercury high performace gear lube (90w). Grease threads of end cap. Thread end cap onto axle. NOTE: End cap is a left hand thread. Secure end cap to 300 inch-pounds.

What type of lube is best for installing bearings, like threaded BB cups, headsets, wheel, and pivot bearings? It may be considered cute to have a noisy ratchet but it will likely slow you down whilst coasting. You'd want a higher viscosity grease on the pawls than you'd use in your bearings but you'd better verify the pawls pop up correctly. Do you use different lubes or suspension fluids on race bikes for different temperatures or weather?Fortunately, we don’t race in extreme cold, but I’d imagine some different suspension fluids could be used to improve performance in extremely cold conditions. I hope to never have to find out, I don’t know how these cyclocross mechanics survive. When you have the two ratchets together and facing each other, coat the teeth around the outer with grease and slide them onto the Thread Ring sitting on the axle. Then slide the freehub body onto the axle, replace then end cap and there you go: one serviced freehub.