Do you normally trust a Shimano hub to be good out of the box?
 

Got delivery of a Shimano Deore 36h hub. It's new, seems to be okay - when I turn it with my fingers it's at the point of being just slightly crunchy/notchy. Do you normally trust new hubs to be lubricated and tensioned correctly?

If it's cup and cone I always check grease and readjust. I'm not sure why you wouldn't.

New hubs very often have a bearing adjustment that's tighter than ideal. Why? I don't know. Maybe they do it that way because it'll get closer to optimal as things wear and settle in.

It's probably cup-and-cone, so you can adjust yourself. That's what I'd do.

I don't trust anything to be adjusted properly. I have seen overly tightened hubs frequently (especially in recent years; machine assembly?)

I've noticed the same and attribute it to the factory workers being forced to do them up quickly. I know when I adjust hub cones it always takes several lockdowns before I'm satisfied with the end results and I've been doing them for decades. OP, take a little time and get the adjustment as good as it can be!

Hubs and pedals always seem to be a bit tight and need some adjustment.

Considering it gets even tighter when you clamp the QR.....
My T-610 was well greased. RM-30's I bought weren't.

I have always found the grease level in new Shimano hubs to be fine but, as noted above, they tend to be adjusted a bit too snug. I always adjust the bearings before using them.

I always disassembly, re-grease, re-assemble any cup cone hub.

But, not until I lace it up. It’s not going anywhere before that, and it is a lot easier.

John

test it after you lace it up. supposedly outward tension from the spokes can pull on the hub just enough to affect bearing preload. I've built hundreds of bikes from the box, and almost all of them had cup-and-cone hubs (some Shimano, some generic) and almost all of them came out of the box with the cone nuts decisively too tight.

I have found this to be the case with hubs and pedals, too tight and skimpily lubricated.

If you buy a hub and build a wheel, checking grease and pre-load is a small time delta.

Thank you for this information.

It had never occurred to me that spoke tension effects preload.

John

Edit Added: Nevermind, but thanks anyway.

I may not disassemble and re-grease them when new, but certainly I fiddle with the adjustment. Doesn't matter how high quality or trustworthy the source.

As far as then if a skewer type hub, QR, then it'll only be worse when clamped. On a thru-axle, I'd still tweak it. And all of this is only to be fiddled with at the time the wheel is ready for installing on the bike. Who knows what's going to happen in the ten or twenty years it might take to get your wheel built. <grin>

Fixed.

=8-|

I've never liked shimano's grease, always feels too sticky, I always replace with white lithium and the hubs feel smoother.

+1, especially pedals. Some of them you nearly can't turn by hand out of the box.

Finally thought of a good analogy... Do you wash your meat before cooking it? Or do you trust the food industry to do that for you?

I usually set the hubs a bight tight when wheel building then after the wheel is completed I revisit the bearing adjustment. Yes, the strain of the spoke tension does expand the hub shell a tiny bit and thus a bearing adjustment can loosen a tad, just like when mounting and inflating a tire on that wheel will slightly reduce the spoke tension. Andy

on second thought, spoke tension affecting cup-and-cone hubs makes almost no sense. extremely unlikely because those hubs are almost always aluminum with steel cups pressed into them. never a bad idea to recheck something like that, but the effect should be minimal. I was thinking of spoke tension affecting some sealed bearing hubs. there were documented issued with some Zipp and G-Sport hubs at one time, but it may have been a fluke.

definitely a good idea to take tension provided by the QR or thru axle into account when you adjust hubs, as the inward pressure will add just a bit of pressure to the preload.

Fixed.

=8-|

Nice to see someone has a clue...

=8-)

Bingo! I can’t say for sure but I suspect that the hub is overtightened so that it doesn’t spin as freely in the wheel building machine.

In theory, one can think that as the spokes pull the hub flanges toward the center (they are not at 0° angle) the hub should compress and that could affect the adjusting. In practice, I never had that happen, an if it does it's so infinitesimal that it can't be measured IMO.

I have seen both cup/cone preload change as well as the press fit nature in a cartridge bearinged hub change with spoke tension. It was Chris King that told me that I had too much spoke tension with the 36 spoked hub of theirs that could never stay in adjustment. (I had finally sent the complete wheel to them after trying all sorts of efforts to keep a bearing adjustment , They stated the slop I was feeling was the drive side bearing moving in it's seat due to too much expansive force from the spoke. I never had this issue with Phils...) Andy

For a three piece steel hub, if the flanges come loose, that's a manufacturing defect, not a spoke tension problem.

For loose ball bearing alloy hubs, the races are cups pressed in.

And they are pressed in very very very tight . . . try to remove one sometime . . . it ain't easy.

If they come loose on their own, that is a manufacturing defect - not a spoke tension problem.

Despite Shimano's early durability quality early on, I have never seen a cup come loose all by itself on a Shimano hub. Shimano has had excellent production QA even on their cheapest products - even back in their early days.

You will see loose cups on Sansin, Suntour, Atom, Maillard, Chosen, Joytech, Quando, among others.

For the Chris King hub, are you sure that the drive side bearing moving in wasn't the result of poor machining or a ratchet ring being driven in under extreme torque? For ALL CARTRIDGE BEARING HUBS, all axles, axle seats, bearing seats, cartridge bearings must be super tight tolerance-wise or you will get axle end play.

It's very easy for a Manufacturer to point somewhere else as the problem instead of admitting a hub left the factory a little "off".

=8-|