My new Hope Pro II hubs are doing well and I’ve been happy with their performance and durability.  It is hard to say how much distance the hubs have covered, but in the three plus months I’ve had them they have been used in several races in dry and muddy conditions.  The seals seem to be doing a good job of keeping the mud and sand out, and the bearings still feel as good as they did when new.  Other than this recent routine maintenance, I haven’t had to do anything to them.

I’m not going to get into much detail on the maintenance.  If you’re looking for more technical info, I found the videos from Hope sufficiently detailed and informative. In comparison to routine Mavic hub maintenance, these are just as simple and the process doesn’t take much time.

Upon removing the cassette there was obvious wear on the aluminum freehub from the smaller individual cogs on the XT cassette.  This is a widely noted shortcoming of the Hope freehub and can make the cassette a little difficult to remove.  Switching to Hope’s steel freehub is an option if the problem gets worse.

Other than that, all I have to add is that an open water bottle is the perfect diameter to re-seat the drive-side seal between the freehub and hub body.  On a related note I used Park Polylube 1000, which in addition to working well in the these hubs, tastes better than most sports drinks.

I have a set of Mavic Crossmax wheels on the Eriksen; an XL on the front and an ST on the back. The rear Crossmax ST started dragging a little and started developing some play in the cassette. A little research pointed me to this MTBR thread and some great videos demonstrating the freehub service form RogueMechanic (Part 1, Part 2). Another useful resource (from the MTBR thread) are these Mavic reference guides.

I started off with the disassembly, and so far so good. All of the components were intact, didn’t look too dirty, and with the exception of the freehub, weren’t excessively worn. After a thorough cleaning things still looked good.

Fast forward a week and the arrival of a new freehub. Thanks to Competitive Cyclist I have a reasonably priced replacement freehub. The new freehub went on with out any difficulties and I was lucky enough to find this oil:

Mavic-branded mineral oil is very expensive, so you can save some cash if you can find this stuff. Anyway, the wheel is back together and the bearing free play is adjusted.  Overall, the service was fairly simple and required no specialty tools aside from the hub wrench Mavic includes with the wheels and standard issue bike tools like a chain whip and lockring tool.  Anyone who can install a cassette should be able to do this without too much difficulty.

During the downtime we had some snow and I had a nice winter ride on the singlespeed: