First Look! New Ultra Lightweight Ashima Disc Brake Rotors (Updated)

Yes, but one has to assume that these rotors are not going to cost $145 a piece. The Scrubs are very nice, and I have sold them on a few bikes, but they are definitely firmly entrenched on the expensive racing toys side of weight weenie-dom. Looking at Ashima’s general pricing structure, I’d be surprised if these worked out to more than $50 a rotor, especially if they are just cut steel with no special surface treatments.

Will they work as well as the Scrubs? Well, that’s a whole other question. Looking forward to reading about the durability and performance of these very minimal looking rotors.

scrub components are domestic

Devo,

True on that. All scrub components Made in the USA.
Kudos for that.

Cody,

As for the noise, which ones are you talking about? They make workhorse, race day, and all mountain. They got rid of their older designs of the race day rotors, the world cup, which may be the ones with the noise problem. I don’t have any issues with the newer race day rotors. Are you using their brake pads or some other manufacturer?

@Fred Zeppelin,

I most recently remember seeing that prohibition on “webless” rotors in regard to some of the lightest model Formula hubs. Could just be that they want to keep their hub buyers buying their rotors as well, but it does make sense that there is a tremendous load on that area. With a normal webbed rotor, the braking load is more likely to be spread spread evenly around all 6, or at the very least, 2-3 of the rotor fixing bolts. Formula’s concern was that when the rotor arms are not connected, you can get a situation where the majority of braking force is instead being transmitted down a single rotor arm, and through a single bolt into a single disk boss on the hub. If they are striving to make their hubs as light as possible by removing material from this area, I could imagine it being a problem.

Interesting other wrinkles on the topic that spring to mind:

You can see Ashima added additional triangulation to each spider arm on this new design vs. the original AiRoter. If that increased rigidity, it would increase the integrity of the rotor, but it seems like it could also increase the point loading on the hub, since the rotor arms will have less “give” to them.

Have you ever seen the folks who only run 3 rotor bolts, rather than the standard 6 (Including fast guys like Ned Overend and Eric Carter)? I would guess that becomes a far worse idea with unwebbed rotors.

FYI, “topped themselves” is UK slang for committing suicide.