D-Fix Rear Hub Reinvents Wheel Removal – Remove the Wheel, Leave the Cassette

Cinelli did this about 50 years ago with the Bivalent hubs.

Neat idea
Looks like it would take longer to tighten the QR. May be a good product for most people but the pros will never go for it. Takes to long to swap wheels

For a road bike this might be acceptable.

But because it doesn’t have an axle tying the left and right dropouts together, it is inherently quite weak. I don’t even trust QR skewers and only run bolt-ons or solid axles. This is going in the opposite direction, being weaker than quick release.

This is custom made for CX. Being able to swap a wheel in and out quickly can save your life if you’re a weekend racer and don’t have someone working the pit for you or a spare bike to switch to.

@Dude – “re-inventing the wheel” – YES!

I’d go for that. Where’s the kickstarter page?

Mmmm… I just carry some disposable plastic gloves. God for other emergencies or even as water proof holders for other things on a wet day.

Cool! Now Shimano can come out with their proprietary wheel/cassette assembly interface, Campy can have their own, then maybe a RR30, then a RR86, then an EVO, maybe an ISIS, then a pressed in version, etc. etc.

As someone else already pointed out, this is hardly a new concept. Only difference is that this design isn’t nearly as well thought out as the Cinelli design! Cinelli used the name Bivalent because with their system there was no front or rear hub – you just had one hub and it could work on the front or back because the wheel had no dish and was spaced the same. This was especially handy for teams and racers as it halved the number of spare wheels needed. The lack of dish also made for a more durable rear wheel. I owned one and it was a brilliant concept. It largely failed for a few reasons:
1) the freewheel part was made by Regina and the hub part by Campagnolo and neither had much interest in making parts for a new design that could eat into their established product lines.
2) it was considerably more expensive than existing systems.
3) it was completely incompatible with existing systems

Hubdock, Cinelli Bivalent, D-fix. They keep pushing something that no one really needs.

Nice idea, and like the idea of redesigning things that works pretty good from the start of. But don’t see the benifits of removing the wheel without puting the chain on the smaller cog, when you have to spend time screwing out the axel connection. To much time and mechanisms that eventually will break. One thing however is the ease when cleaning the chain drive without the back wheel on, when you have the bike on a working stand. This way you’ll never get grease on the disk.

Spoke Buster: you’ve misunderstood; Chris is right. By “lack of dish,” Chris means a wheel with equal length spokes on each side. Non-disk front wheels are dishless. The Cinelli Bivalent hubs built into dishless wheels which could be used front or rear. The convention in the bike world is that rims centered between the hub flanges are dishless. It happens to be the opposite of the car world (except not really; in cars this wheel dimension is called offset). Casual car enthusiasts (and serious pizza enthusiasts) sometimes talk about “deep dish wheels,” hence the confusion.

I don’t believe this concept is necessarily a product for race teams. Speed of removal is not a significant advantage. A pro team wrench could remove and REPLACE a rear wheel in the time it took to unscrew the QR in the video.

The concept WOULD be really nice for the recreational cyclist (think club riders) who would like to keep hands clean, not mar the chain stay paint job and (like in my case) might like the convenience of stuffing the bike in the back of a very small car and not have a dirty chain dangling around and staining the upholstery. Getting BOTH wheels off the bike and into a small car means not needing a ($$$) bike rack on the roof (where the bike gets doored by garages … we’ve all seen it, right?) or on the tailgate (risk of a rear-end), kills fuel efficiency due to aero-drag and cruds up the bike.

I can see this fitting into the urban/travel bike market as well. But I’d guess Campy and Shimano wouldn’t partner for it for reasons mentioned earlier.

Shimano might however “reinvent” after the patent expires. 😉

Properly designed, there’s no reason it couldn’t be as solid as a thru-axle, and modern CNC machining makes production costs a non-issue if the volume is there.

The Cinelli system had to be based on 120 mm or more dropout spacing and 5-speed or less freewheels.

I don’t see how it’s possible to build a dishless rear wheel given the width of an 8/9/10-speed freehub body and the constraints of a 130 or even 135 mm dropouts.

use multiple wheelsets with the same cassette, no shifting re-adjustment with wheel change, wheelsets are cheaper with no freehub. Yes, sign me up

This isn’t a new concept by any means. As mentioned, Cinelli did it in the 60’s / 70’s and the French did it way before them. Rene Herse was an early pioneer in things like this. Check out this website for a little more info. https://concoursdelegance.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/stay-out-of-problems-dont-get-your-hands-dirty/

Cute.

What is the POE?

This is a fantastic concept for 142×12 1/4 turn thru-axles. Wheel changes on disc brake bikes would literally take a second if they used a quarter-turn style mount.

A dinky quick release-sized split axle might not be strong enough to hold up to a lot of abuse without the wheel installed, but a 12mm axle might be.

Imagine the possibilities if you could only have to buy one freehub ever, that had a star-ratchet system that quickly and easily interfaced with any wheel on the market, be it front or rear. No more need to buy specialized freehubs or wheels for different cassettes or drivetrains. Granted, that would mean that forks would have to be redesigned to accomodate the same hub size as the rear… but they already do that on fatbikes.

Of course, this will never happen in the bike industry because nobody wants to cooperate and agree to build things to a certain standard… That would actually make SENSE!

Awesome idea! However, this puts the design crux on the axle. Might work on road bikes, but doubtful if a mountain bike axle could be made strong enough to not bend. However, with axle sizes trending larger and larger, might eventually work…

Excellent idea. Don’t think the Bivalent idea of front – rear wheel interchangeability is a goer. That was in the days of 5 speed on 100 -120 mm front – rear. The Bivalent just had very shallow dish on both sides: the same as the rear drive side on both sides. Anyway, Jan isn’t proposing this.
The tho-axle, particularly with quarter-turn skewer would make it even better.
Unfortunately this would probably mean a new wider over-lock nut rear fork end standard and frame.
I think even the videoed design would be much quicker than a current QR wheel change.
If practiced and shot in a side of the road comparison situation the viewer wouldn’t see what was happening.
Cynics would then cry slight of hand.
If Contador can win the T de F by 39 seconds from Andy Schleck and loose Paris – Nice by 4 seconds to Geraint Thomas, I would say a quick, reliable wheel change and setting off in a gear selected while coming to a halt is a race winner as well as being more convenient for us lesser mortals.