sbarner 

The axles were one of the things that both Weyless and Phil Wood got right. Most of the later Italian and some of the Asian cartridge bearing hubs used threaded axles, but cartridge bearings do not tolerate misalignment as well as cup-and-cone bearings do, and any standard diameter QR hub axle bows when clamped in. I still like them when they take standard sized bearings because it is so easy to replace the entire unit that it almost doesn't matter how long the bearings last when you can replace them for ten bucks in 20 minutes. Very few regular hubs have replaceable cups and the parts were always difficult to source. These days you need to go to donor hubs and hope for the best, but you can keep a Specialized/Suzue sealed hub going forever. Phil hubs require special tools to replace the bearings, Hi-E forced you to remove the entire hub so you could pull the flanges. I am not sure about Weyless, but it looks like the cartridges press into the hub flanges. The upside with the Phil and Weyless hubs was the miles you could put on them before bearing replacement was required.

I found it interesting that the Weyless ad touts 0.0002 inch precision on the bearings. I hope that was on the O.D. or I.D. and not the bearing internals. Either that, or perhaps they left out a zero, or meant 0.0002 mm, which would be quite impressive.