Just remembered one annoying thing about the mod zero. The rear dropouts prevented me from mounting a Tubus rack at the upper mounting point because the dropout / seatstay junction interfered with the rack. I had to mount the rack on the lower position and the fenders on the upper position.
Hmm I could see that. Mike is really proud of those dropouts lol…
I feel like I want a Mod Zero but I would want to build that one up from scratch into a nice bike and it starts getting pricey. I feel like if I got a Disc Trucker frameset that I would feel less weird about taking a bunch of the shit off my LHT and moving it over. Not sure what sense that makes.
That’s real risk. I built mine from the parts bin other than I think a headset, BB, pusher, cables/housing, and some flat to post mount brake adapters. But then it got a bunch of unneeded fancy parts last winter and spring that didn’t really make it a better bike and mainly just made my wallet lighter.
I could have spaced it out but mounting it lower was free.
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I just did some bad excel math and building out a Mod Zero the way I want would be about $3k and building out a Disc Trucker while reusing my 3x8/9 drivetrain would be $2k lol… Glad I could talk myself out of both options before noon today
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I like to do some rough what did it cost spreadsheets for every bike after they’re done (in its current state, not every part purchased that didn’t get used or got replaced) and maybe I shouldn’t do that for either of these.
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Got back from a nice ride yesterday and immediately dove into a parts compatibility rabbit hole.
I have some rims lying around and I was thinking of how nice it’d be to build something around a nice shimano dyno hub, and was looking around for a shimano QR rear hub in a matching glossy black. That sent me looking at the 10-speed XTR hubs, FH-M985, which have a lot going for them. They seem to be not that expensive when they come up for sale, but they don’t come up for sale that often. The later Deore XT rear hub, the FH-M8000, looks basically the same, costs like $40, and just weighs another 60 grams. But then I go looking at the Shimano parts diagrams and notice that the FH-M8000 has complete parts interchangeability with its predecessor, the Deore XT FH-M785. And the FH-M785 shares most of its parts with its predecessor, the Deore XT FH-M775, and the freehub fits on the XTR FH-M985, and the XTR FH-M975, which are the same but in titanium, and also the Dura-Ace FH-7850 hub of the time. Is this enough to say that Shimano figured out the basics of making a hub by the mid-00s and just kind of keep it running for a decade or so, changing the aesthetics a bit but not so much the function? Maybe that’s a stretch.
I don’t know where that puts me myself in my hub dithering thoughts. Should I wait for an M985 hub to show up for sale? Should I just get a M8000 one and save myself the worry? Should I get a junked Dura-Ace hub for another $50 just to swap the freehub body onto that M8000 hub? Whatever!
What I also idly wonder about is how much I can parallel this interchangeability with what we see in the car industry in Japan at the same time. The Japanese economy went through it starting in the early ‘90s with the asset price bubble bursting. A few years later we started to see the reverberations of that show up in the cars companies like Toyota were putting out. In ‘90-’91, we got the third-gen Camry, which for a lot of geopolitical reasons had gotten very nice both in design and in quality. Its successor was basically the same car but with some new styling. The generation after that, which came out around the year 2000, kept basically the same design for a little over a decade and a half, just getting little tweaks here and there. That doesn’t completely align with Shimano’s hubs being quite so similar through that same timeline, but it’s enough for me to wonder about it, and enough for me to go around and see if any bike journalists talked about it at the time.
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I for one think you should do the maximum dither just because I want to read about it.
I personally would just buy the M8000 hub and build a wheel but I’m boring.
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bikeman has FH-M8000 listed in stock at $50 but life’s too short to adjust balls and cones ever again.
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Exactly just buy a white industries once and replace 6708s every time it gets wet
those aren’t the only options
Exactly just buy a king and send it in for service every other season
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I haven’t been biking that long but I got a lot of bikes with cup and cone bearings and I’ve never once adjusted any of them.
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