Advice from my mother

My mother always said that if you are buying something you want to keep for a while, buy the best you can.

Working with a Curtis Odom hub for the first time, I knew my mother would approve. I was blown away the attention to detail. I was expecting a beautifully finished, smooth rolling hub with an extraordinary design carved into the oversize flange. I got all of that. I also got the best-thought out hub/spoke interface that I have ever worked with. What had appeared to be a price expensive but still fair to both parties is now a bargain.

Let me tell you why: When I snapped the first spoke into place in the hub, it was like only one other hub I had worked with, a particular small period of time during the production of Campagnolo Record hubs. I had spoken with Curtis about a week before I got the hubs, and we agreed that it was harder to lace a wheel with these hubs but worth it for the life of the wheels built around the hubs.

To get the spokes to fit perfectly and settle in for the long haul, the hub flange has to be exactly right. The right shape and diameter of spoke hole, the right thickness of the hub flange, the right alloy for the forging and the right forging itself. Curtis nailed every detail.

A build with these hubs takes a little longer, because the spokes are a tight fit and the flange thickness matches the size of the spoke elbow. Once the spokes are tensioned and pressed into place, the head of the spoke is flush against the hub flange and the bend of the spoke is gently cradled in a trough of deformed alloy. The chances of fatigue failure of a spoke are close to zero. I hesitate to say never, but I cannot see any combination of load and road that would cause spokes to fail in these hubs. 

The only time I have worked with hubs close to this good was in the early 1980s, when Campagnolo Record hubs had tight spoke holes. The were slow and hard to get laced up, but the wheels built with them were special right from the start. Curtis remembered those hubs and incorporated everything we liked about those hubs and incorporated them into his hubs, then made them into decorative art besides. Take a look at the pictures in the posting just before this one. Pictures of the finished wheels will be posted after Cirque.