Hed 3 -- is a wobbly hub "normal"?

Triathlon Forum
1

The cassette on my new Hed 3 wheel wobbles slightly.

According to Hed, “Due to not being able to true an H3, we have to put a shim into the hub. It is between the cassette body and the hub shell and it will make the hub wobble. It is either that or having a wheel that is not true. It won’t damage your cassette.”

Now, I don’t know much about bikes, but I would expect that for the money, I could expect a pair of wheels that are close to perfect. I quizzed a bunch of folks at the Gulf Coast Expo, and their consensus was that Hed is making excuses for a bad wheel.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Thanks

2

The cassette on my HED 3 doesnt wobble at all.

3

HED 3 a “bad wheel”?

Yes, sometimes a HED 3 has to be shimmed to center or true it, but the resulting cassette wobble in no way affects the performance of the wheel and/or cassette. Mine was shimmed, my cassette wobbles, and it performs perfectly. If it drives you crazy, or you think it wobbles too much, tell HED. They have excellent customer service and they’ll take care of you somehow.

HED 3 is a “bad wheel” (“bad” as in “good”!)

4

“I quizzed a bunch of folks at the Gulf Coast Expo, and their consensus was that Hed is making excuses for a bad wheel.”

the ‘bunch of people’ you quizzed at gulf coast either don’t know anything about wheels, or if they were expo sellers they were making excuses for their own inability to sell the wheel themselves, or to sell it with the margins they want. no ethical, competent person would say that the hed3 was anything but a spectacular wheel.

my hed3’s hub does not wobble, neither does my cassette on my hed3. if your cassette wobbles i suspect it’s installed wrong. if i’d been expo’ing at your race i’d have fixed it for you.

there are a variety of good wheels out there. the hed3 has consistently demonstrated its superiority in wind tunnel tests. ergo, the posties and ONCE have ridden it for years in times races for no money. likewise, lightweights and ADAs are the obvious choice for the ascents by those in the pro peletons, as replacements for the wheels provided by the team sponsors.

follow the money, my boy.

5

Dan,

Agree 100% to follow the money, that’s why I didn’t immediately trust what Hed said. Also, I discount what the expo guys say, since I know they make their living selling wheels. What most of them said was that they haven’t seen wobbly hubs/cassette on the Hed 3, and that they suspected that this particular wheel was a bad/defect wheel.

No one said that the Hed 3 in general was a bad wheel, in fact most said that it was a great wheel, and thats why I bought it. I don’t think that the cassette was installed incorrectly, since it was installed by my bike shop, and also since Hed as much as admitted that the hub could be wobbly.

I guess I’m looking for guidance as to wether or not I should return the wheel and hope the next one I get doesn’t wobble. Since I am already on my second set (the first set was shipped with numerous dents/dimples on the rim), I’m starting to lose confidence in the company.

If you are slow I am glacial. Thanks.

6

see, i specifically ASK for the blems, to see if i can get a cheaper wheel. while i routinely get blems and seconds, i’ve never, in 15 years of riding hed wheels, ever gotten anything that wasn’t eminently rideable.

in fact, i rode my hed alps in a uscf bike race the week before wildflower. 24 spokes. 5000’ of climbing. light, straight, stiff, perfect. monty (who also rode hed alps) and i rode away from the group we were with on the descents.

i guess i just live in a parallel universe from those of you who’ve got wheel toubles.

7

Actually, you bring up a GREAT point. Keep the wheel, and now I have an excuse as to why I couldn’t keep with Spencer Smith at Gulf Coast (25+mph)…cool. It’s either the wheel or my weakness/inexperience/bad genes…later

8

I think part of the problem may be that you are in a much better position than many of us to decide what is “eminently rideable” and HED does not respond appropriately to those of us with less expertise. I have not been thrilled with my dealings with HED but suspect it is due to my ignorance and their lack of tolerance for it. I have a HED3 and I am very happy with it, but it is a strange sensation to look down upon it. There is all kinds of weirdness looking at that hub. Real or illusion, I do not know-but, admittedly, if I ignore it-it rides fine. My real problem was with my ALPS. I am used to a very true wheel (not my HED3, which is a very slight bit off, but my other sets). I did not think my first ALPS were anywhere near as true as they should be. I just wanted to know if that was normal or whether I should insist on better. I was not pleased with the way my inquiries were addressed. But-HED did take them back through my shop and sent me a new set. They really are not much better and I did not push it-when I replaced my old HED disk-I went RENN and am happier, especially for the money. For the money HED gets I expect my ignorance to be addressed. I think the ALPS are probably fine, but I do not like looking down at a wheel that is not true and not know if that really is the best I can expect (and how much that effects me), or if HED is having trouble with quality control and I just got stuck.

9

i’ve ridden my alps in quite a few races, and several hundred miles of racing later i find that i need to true mine (well, my rear, not my front).

i also have recently had to go through a variety of my wheels, all hand-built (not by me, but by professional wheel builders) and retrue them as well. this would be dura ace / mavic open pro wheels, and campy record / velocity wheels. my training wheels i’m talking about. these are all 32 spokes front and rear. my alps is 24 spoke front, and 32 spoke rear built around a powertap hub.

my alps came to me true. yes, you need your wheels to be reasonably true and round when you get them. but any spoked wheel is going to eventually go out of true, esp if you race on severely bumpy roads as was the case with wildflower (my most recent race).

you might not be the guy to true your wheels, you might have to take them to someone who’ll true them for you. but you and other readers ought not to make this more of a mystery than it is. companies like zipp, mavic and hed are expert rim makers. these companies vary in their abilities to make decent hubs. but they’re all reasonably good hubs. after that, you’re just talking about the ability of a person to built a wheel. there’s no mystery here. if the wheel builder is good, your wheels will be round, true, the spokes will have a reasonably even and appropriate tension, and will stay that way for awhile.

i specifically choose alps because they’re a moderately priced, very light, quite aero wheel that also has a stiff rim and an aluminum braking surface. they are the best value in their class.

cost no object, if i was road racing on hilly courses, i’d ride ADAs or lightweights. conceptually i might like the new, light reynolds wheels in place of these, though i haven’t ridden them.

flatter course, i’d ride a disk in the rear and a hed3 in the front.

you could sub in some zipp models for the hed models described above and i’d have no quarrel with that.

but that’s the race wheel environment, decoded. those are the wheels that ought to be considered, imho. when a retailer says anything derogatory about either a hed or a zipp wheel, i personally would question the business model of his store as regards wheels. it is really unfortunate, but this is the case. the stakes are high for retailers selling big ticket, high volume items, and if they have to embroider their narrative in order to make payroll, well, truth is sometimes a casualty. this has been my experience. in 25 years of being a triathlete, 15 of them in the business, zipp and hed consistently, year after year, are both the best citizens of triathlon and the best technical builders of aero race wheels. when i find any dealer who says otherwise i immediately start looking for an agenda. speaking for myself, personally, the onus is on that dealer to cite to me specifically why he’s bagging on either of these two companies.

now, this is an interesting year in the business. lots of stuff going on. i’ve given you a clue. it’s up to you to decide what to do with it. meanwhile i’ll be very happily riding much faster splits on my equipment than my ability or fitness justifies.

10

"my hed3’s hub does not wobble, neither does my cassette on my hed3. if your cassette wobbles i suspect it’s installed wrong. "

Sorry to correct you Dan-o, but as HED said, HED 3’s can be “centered” (i.e. they are made “true”, but they might get or be off axis and need to be centered, not trued) and that process involves shimming the axle, which results in a slight “wobble” of the cassette. As I posted earlier, mine does it, and I watched Andy at HED in Bear Lake shim it and he explained the process and the resulting wobble to me. With that I rode off in confidence.

(Plus, I don’t see how you can install a cassette “wrong” where it wobbles. )

11

“Sorry to correct you Dan-o, but as HED said, HED 3’s can be ‘centered’”

well, yes, according to that explanation, i don’t believe i own a hub that CAN’T be centered. but i misunderstood the issue. i thought the cassette cogs were loose. now i believe i understand that the cassette cogs are tight, but that the entire thing wobbles around the axis of the axle. while this is not an issue in performance, the cause of this, when it has happened to me in the past, is either a cheaper cassette or a slightly bent axle. when it’s the latter i find that it’s sometimes a case that the skewer has been clamped down extremely tightly, deforming or compressing what’s inbetween the dropouts, or that the hub’s lock nuts that sit just inside the dropouts are excessively tight.

but, me not being a wrench per se, i’m sure this isn’t the exhaustive list of causes.

12

Don’t get me wrong-I have no intention of slamming HED or any of those other companies. I race a HED3 front and am totally satisfied. My bike shop, who you know and apparently hold in fairly high regard (as do I after 15 or so bike purchases for me and my family in as many years-), also has in no way slammed or would they any of these companies. My shop agreed that the wheels were not adequately true. They did not have the tool to true and called HED. HED, I am told, said not to true them but to send them back-which I think was appropriate, but the replacements were little better with no explanation. I do not know what all transpired between HED and my LBS, but I am not sure my LBS was totally satisfied with their response-or at least the attitude of HED (I could be way wrong). Are my new wheels as good as they should be?-I do not know. If I was sure they were bad, I would have sent them back. Why didn’t HED respond the way you have? I doubt you have any more time then they do and it is their product. I am in no way anti-HED. This has not been a terrible experience. If they have the product for me I will buy it. But if someone else has as good a product, my experiences with HED (after 4 wheel purchases) would certainly not have won my loyalty. I think the periodic posts on this site about great service, I think there was one today about De Soto, show that it does matter. You do a great job of making sure those in the industry are not unfairly slammed, but the experiences of the common man has with some of these companies is different than yours.

13

Also, does your Hed 3 seem to have a “heavy” spot that the wheel always settles to? I e-mailed Hed about this and was told that this was normal.

14

“the experiences of the common man has with some of these companies is different than yours.”

you might be ascribing to me more juice than i actually have. i get a lot of products through this place of mine, and i must be honest and say that i do not report most of the bad stuff that i see. it’s not because i want to hide what’s bad, but because i have to judge whether a problem is a one-off or an endemic problem.

some of my favorite products are those with which i’ve had bad experiences. but i still ride them anyway, because on balance the product deserves to be ridden.

then there’s the service question, and bad service is inexcusable. that said, throughout the past decade the posts on hed’s service have overwhelmingly been like the de soto post you refer to. when it comes to service, hed is not one of the bad guys. they’re one of the good guys.

as for your dealer, do not necessarily assume that i hold your LBS in high regard. i don’t know who it is, and i don’t need to know. but again i repeat, follow the money. it could be that there’s stuff going on between hed and your LBS that you don’t know. hed is absolutely, positively spot on with customer service. but one thing about hed. if you’re a vendor or a retailer and you jerk them around, they have zero problem telling you to fuck off, euphemistically speaking. they’re midwestern straightforward that way.

15

I belive it is the freehub that gets shimmed,and yes almost everything has a heavy spot and that spot will settle on the down side,This is why you balance your car tires/boat props/ flywheels/driveshafts/crankshafts/etc etc etc
.

16

I would like to drag this back to the first post if I may, I can’t contact Ironstevie directly because I don’t have his email address. I think that I am probably the guy he talked to when he called Hed. Obviously he was not satisfied after our conversation - I did not get this impression, but it is obviously the case.
Soooooo… from my perspective.

  • Sorry, I should have done a better job on the phone. I am as close as we get to a customer service rep. When I am not on phone, I build wheels. I would like to think I know what I am talking about when it comes to our products.
  • It is normal for our H3s and discs to have some cassette body runout. They are both molded wheels so there are not spokes we can use to true the wheel. It is harder for me to put it into words than to show with a wheel in my hand, but picture this:
    you can think of the wheel as having a series of lines running from top to bottom, each corresponding to a component of the wheel. both sides of the rim get a line, these two are parallel. The hub flanges get another set of parallel lines, a little outboard of the rim sides. There is a third set, further out where the hub rotates on the axle bearings.
    On a perfect wheel, all three sets are lined up when you put it together the first time. They never are, which is why you true a wire spoked wheel and shim a Hed 3. On the H3, the hub flanges and rim cannot be manipulated, they are permanently molded together. We can (and do) change the alignment of the axle bearings in relation to the hub and rim in order to get the rim and hub rotating in the same plane as the bearings and make the wheel as true as possible.
    Although I must not have explained it well on the phone, the end result is this:
    we can either set the wheel so that the axle bearings and cassette body bearings are in line, or we can set the wheel so that the axle bearings and the rim are in line. On this wheel it is not possible to do both. Some hubs need a bigger shim than others, but all of them have one in order to make the wheel as true as possible.
    Ironstevie, if you are not satisfied, call and talk to Anne, she will generally do what it takes to make her customers happy.
    hoping I have not muddied the waters even more, AndyT.
17

AndyT,

Thanks for the explanation. I’ll call Anne and see what we can do.

Steve

18

I rode a 3D (Kona Coast) at the end of last year, it did exactly the same thing, the cassette was tight, not bent, no skewer damage. Had the LBS contact HED. Same answer as above, a shim to true the wheel which causes a wobbling in the cassette.

We (LBS and I) went through a couple of 3Ds and found the same thing in different degrees. I have a pair of ALPS (tubulars) with no wobble. Word from LBS was that they are working on that issue (as it relates to the 3Ds) but I can’t confirm that nor I have i heard of this on the ALPS.