Paul Components gets patriotic with Red, White & Blue QR Skewers for 4th of July

French, Dutch, Thai, Icelandic and Norwegian colour scheme, wow! Never knew USicans could be so internationaly minded, and on their own national day, even. Kudos!

Not a big fan of Paul Component Engineering anymore. It looks pretty and is made to good tolerances, but most of it is marketing fluff: “CNC”, “Made in the USA”, “we’re the little guy”. But the stuff doesn’t always work well. In my experience, their durability is hit and miss. I had a sealed bearing front hub of theirs, it had a giant 25.4mm axle and titanium bolts. After about two and a half years, the thing developed play. I replaced the bearings, but the hub shell had stretched, so the play remained. The hub had been discontinued, Paul himself told me on the phone in this voice like he was in awe of me that I had this rare, important museum piece (that hub model had been discontinued).
I remember also their brake levers, which also looked cool, but had a somewhat wobbly pivot that was totally unsealed and made of brass. Dirt and corruption would get in there, and get impregnated in the soft brass, necessitating a cleaning. They also visibly flexed when you pulled hard. Woo-hoo. What are they, 140 bucks a set?
I did have their V-Brakes, pretty good stuff, with a good QR design.
The QR’s here look pretty good. But Shimano XT would do a great job, too.
Gunnstein- you forgot Russia, another country with a sprawling geography that isolates its citizens, making them patriotic. It’s easy to be patriotic when you’re not surrounded by constant comparisons between yourself and other countries. Geographically, Northern Europe won the lottery- it’s made up of tiny countries near major trade routes (almost all of Sweden’s population is in a narrow 500km band- easy to provide social services to everyone) and oil deposits (Norway). You’re simply luckier than US citizens, who are luckier than Russians, who are less lucky than, most Chinese, who are luckier than Chadians. Your societies are morally superior, but are made up of individuals like you who were simply lucky to be born where you were born. Your own pride seems to be based on complacency and your own personal luck…

Hooray Internet! It’s not often a skewer shout-out can inspire a concise summary of a company that transitions into a more concise summary of Europe and its relation to the world. Just remember that a geographic lottery is not really a thing, let alone one to be “won” – it is all a process of people living on a land with various properties. Geography is a science, not a sport. Can we say the Manhattan Project “won” against atoms?

With that, can you please make a flow chart or graph showing each nation’s luck?

+1 for mentioning Chad and its residents.

@Tim
Epic dude

@Tim Next time, try asking rather than assuming what other people think, maybe? I was making fun of US patriot-/nationalism, but I’m not a fan of nationalism in any nation, including my own. Makes no sense to be proud of where I was born, I had no say in the matter. US nationalism is just an easy target because it’s so massively exposed everywhere, including here on BR.

“trite digs at plain folks from the US” I don’t recall doing that. What people on this planet is not plain, when it comes down to it?

Russia is a good one, I also forgot UK, AUS, NZ and tons of others. Red/white/blue is popular.

Yes, my country won the lottery. But morally superior? Hardly. We pollute little, but we do export oil, gas and coal to other countries who do the polluting for us.

Yeah, QR is cool, and ‘Merica is cool,l but the rest of the MTB industry moved to Thru-axles YEARS ago. When they were originally developing these prototypes I saw a thru-axle variant that never made it to market. What’s the holdup on those?

Thru axle options and disc brakes please!