White Industries XMR Front Hub

White Industries XMR hubs are the pinnacle of good but simple disc hubs.  Here's the quick pitch.  This XMR front hub is 100mmm wide by 12mm or 15mm with the swap of an end cap.  Steel axle for no bearing galling and stiffness.  Decently light.  Thick flanges.  We've never seen a White hub fail.  Suitable for mountain, touring or gravel.  Need the boost version for 110 mm spacing?  Get the XMR+ front hub.  Read on if you want the deep dive into why White Industries:

White Industries. Dang. Where do I start? I (james) have been selling White Industries stuff for 20+ years, and have only ever had a handful of issues, okay only two. I’ll tell you about them both, because if you are reading on our website, you are obviously a sucker for overtly verbose product descriptions.

Back when single speeds were still cool, along with sideburns, Rockabilly and IPAs, a group of weirdos in Philly put together an annual ride called ‘more beers less gears’. The ride was a series of laps on dodgy DIY singletrack that started and ended under a bridge in a wooded park. Every lap was preceeded by downing another beer. The ride culminated in a log pull and a trials course. The winner got, as I recall, a pile of cogs and such fashioned into a trophy. Jason S. (you know who you are) was working it toward the end of the trials section, mental state suitably ‘altered’ by a number of laps on the single track, but still in control of his whip. He hopped his singlespeed up onto a huge concrete block, and in the process, smashed his chainring into the block. It cracked. On the news of that one crack, White Industries redesigned their chainring and made it thicker and tougher. I’ve heard of no further issues with their rings. To be fair, the impact was hard enough that it also blew his pedal body off the spindle. So he had two mechanicals with one impact.

Years later, after having sold countless White hubs and cranks, I had a customer come in with a new to him but actually very old White Industries hub. It needed to be cracked open, have the freehub mechanism cleaned, and the bearing play adjusted. We ended up replacing the bearings. This is the extent of the service I’ve had to perform on White Industries hubs. Sometimes the bearings get sloppy, and you have to adjust them. That’s on one outta every maybe 50 hubs we sell. They need an occasional snug up. Rarely do they need anything more.

No hub is immune to salty water, thin soupy mud, pressure washers, or the like. But the White Industries hubs are more immune than most, and need very little love over the course of their life. I’ve been running the same White hubs on the last 3 framesets I’ve owned.

Techy stuff:

High static load rating. That means these hubs need a mighty wallop to deform under load. Pothole impacts at speed with a loaded touring bike kinda loads.

Steel Axle. Big diameter, strong steel axle. See high static load rating.

Rebuildable freehub body, no weird tools needed. Just a little allen key.  Take that Chris King. 

Adjustable bearings. Why the heck would you make a hub that does not have a preload option for the bearings? When bearings wear a bit, they need to be adjusted, not replaced. White hubs are easy to adjust, no weird tools needed.

Ti Freehub body. Most light hubs use an aluminum freehub body, which (except Bitex and a few others) is a terrible engineering mistake. Aluminum freehubs get notched by the cassette, making cassette removal an affair that requires time, a six pack, a flat head screwdriver and a curse word thesaurus. Ti is lighter than steel, and less gouge prone than aluminum, making it a great high end freehub material. But! Make sure you apply anti-seize to the titanium before installing your cassette!

Thick, widely spaced flanges. No weird thin cracky weight weenie flanges here.

Impeccable finishing. The Olympus Pen F of the bike world. The polishing is perfect but not over done. The knurled axle end caps are a work of CNC’d art. The shape of the hub body is of the Jaguar E type variety, not the boxy Doleranesque shape of the Bitex hubs.

Pretty light. Not Tune Mig and Mag light, but light for a touring worthy hub.

Made in the US of A. Go ‘Merica!