Bill Shook from American Classic is constantly looking to build better wheels and hubs: they were early adopters of tubeless and wide rims. Although they offer carbon rim options now, American Classic still uses aluminum extensively. For instance, their Wide Lightning wheelset uses a 29mm (internal) rim and weighs only 1512g for the 27.5″ size. That’s crazy light for such a wide rim.
They also have some cool features on their hubs, like the steel inserts on the aluminum freehub body to prevent your cassette from gouging it. If you’ve ever struggled to remove a cassette that’s been mounted for a while, you’ll appreciate this.
They are one of the few companies producing a front hub that will work with RockShox’s top-of-the-line RS-1 fork. American Classic uses end caps without splines, which they claim creates a better/stiffer interface between the hub and fork dropouts. If you look at RS-1 hubs from DT Swiss and others, the end caps have splines which Bill claims serve no purpose other than to chew up your fork.
They also had fat bike hubs in various widths on display. No matter how fat you want to go, they’ve got a hub to fit your frame. The front hub is available in 135mm and 150mm widths, while the rears come in 170m and 190mm widths.
