A Closer Look At The Updates To Chris King's MTB Hubs

While it wasn't clear initially, in the weeks following Chris King's 2020 Virtual Open House, it came out that the company was moving to only offering centerlock rotor-mounting interfaces for its future offerings. 

At first, we didn't have any photos, but now with the arrival of a few parts, we've been able to snag some photos of the new hubs, and we wanted to run through some of the changes that stood out to us.

The changes are mostly all small, and focused around adapting the hubs to their new Centerlock rotor interface, but they're certainly not insignificant.

On the rear hub, the changes are found (unsurprisingly) around the non-drive-side.  The adjuster cap is much smaller so as to not interfere with the rotor mounting hardware, and it has a helper hole that extends all the way through the cap.  The size of this adjuster allows you to adjust the hub without removing the rotor, which is a nice touch.  One final change to the adjuster is the move to a torx-head bolt.  Beyond those small changes (and the obvious very large change to a centerlock rotor mount), there are some changes to the axle and driveshell, which allow you to use the same axle in all driveshells, which is pretty huge.  In the past most driveshells needed their own specific axle, but with this change, they all use the same one which should make swapping driveshells much easier (and less expensive!).  One final change to the driveshell is that all driveshells will now be alloy.  We'll have more on the internals in an upcoming blog post so stay tuned!

Up front, the hub underwent very similar changes to those on the rear, however because the adjuster cap is on the drive side for the front hub, it doesn't shrink in the way the rear did.  The adjuster cap does look slightly smaller than before though (looking like it's based more around the ISO-B front hub rather than around the larger ISO-AB that's shown in the comparison photos in this post), and the hub shell has more of a concave shape where it meets that cap.  The adjuster cap also gets the same helper hole that goes clean through the cap as well as the torx bolt head.  Finally, and most notably for us at least is the change to the end caps on the front hub.  They are now all black aluminum, and have a slightly curved taper.  An extremely minor change, but one that stood out to us.

Check out the gallery below for more photos of the new hubs in addition to photos that compare the previous ISO version of the hubs with the new Centerlock ones.

Whether you prefer Centerlock or 6-bolt rotor mounting standards, we think you'll like these hubs.  They're stilling rolling on Chris King's fantastic bearings that have a lifetime warranty, and they've still got the same reliable, fast-engaging Ring Drive freehub system, so that makes for a solid hub in our book. 

If you want to get yours on order, you can head over to our Chris King Hubs collection.