This was an impulse buy. I should regret it, but I don’t. I’ve wanted an ENO hub for a long time, partly because it’s useful for fixing (“turning into fixies”) bikes with vertical dropouts, but mostly because it’s such a cool idea. I have a goal of putting White hubs on a couple of my bikes, but haven’t yet. I love hubs. I’m attracted to the shiny blingy ones, but I really like the ones that do weird things.
This hub has a center of rotation that is non-congruent with the axle ends. This feature lets you run a singlespeed or fixed wheel on a bike with vertical dropouts, because you can swing the hub backwards to tighten the chain. Before the ENO Eccentric, you would have needed to calculate a Magic Gear, in order to have a decent chain tension with a vertical dropout. So it’s cool, and extremely niche. In fact, secret knowledge is the essence of cool.
This one has 135mm rear spacing, so it could be built into a 26″ wheel for the Bontrager, or a 29er wheel for the Gravel Roadster. I like the Bontrager as it is, and I just geared up the Gravel Roadster with a derailleur and cassette.
So I have a hub that’s begging for a new bike to be built around it. Oops. Maybe a Legolas or Black Mountain Cycles cyclocross bike? A Jones doesn’t need this, since it comes with an eccentric bottom bracket that does the same thing. Those are all unlikely choices, since I already spent my discretionary funds on this hub… oops.
The other “oops” is that it was cut out of its wheel before the cog and lockring were removed. I figured I’d lace it to a rim, to get some leverage on the cog, but it’s going to be hard to weasel spokes past the cog and into the spoke holes in the first place.
I won’t keep the cog on there. I don’t think I can build a wheel without removing the cog, and I don’t use 1/8″ cogs, anyway. Or lockrings (the Rotafix Method is fine). So… what’s the best method to remove a cog from a hub, if you can’t use the rim for leverage?
One thought on “White ENO hub with a cog, lockring and no spokes”