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D-Fix Rear Hub Reinvents Wheel Removal – Remove the Wheel, Leave the Cassette

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D-Fix
In order to remove nearly every rear bicycle wheel, you have to separate the chain from the cassette. In certain instances, that can be prove to be tricky – not to mention the potential for grease to get on your hands, gloves, car trunk, etc. Jan Deckx thinks there is a better way.

As the inventor of D-Fix, Jan came up with a way to attach the hub and the cassette in a way that leaves the cassette in place when you remove the wheel. Sort of a thru-axle housed in a quick release hub, the cassette uses a spring loaded engagement system that retracts when the axle is removed. Jan tells us that he currently has 10,000 km on this hub pointing towards its durability.

Watch a video demonstration of the hub system next…


While the hub seems to have no immediate plans for production, Jan does provide his email address for interested parties (ambideckxter@hotmail.com). What do you think? Would you be interested in a D-Fix hub?

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43 Comments
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J W
J W
10 years ago

This is the stupidist thing I have seen since rapid rise. If you can,t learn to remove and reinstal a wheel take up running

il Bruce
il Bruce
10 years ago

Cinelli did this about 50 years ago with the Bivalent hubs.

Gunnstein
Gunnstein
10 years ago

Damn. This would make not just flat fixes, but also wheelset changes and direct-attach trainers, rather easier to deal with. Nice, whether he invented the concept or not. (Sure, wheel changes are simple anyway on some bikes. On others, not so much. I have one or two bikes that would benefit from this for sure.)

m
m
10 years ago

Neat idea
Looks like it would take longer to tighten the QR. May be a good product for most people but the pros will never go for it. Takes to long to swap wheels

Dude
Dude
10 years ago

Exposes the guts to dirt and grit. Fun idea, needs more refinement and some decent market research before re-inventing the wheel. There’s a lot of this type of product out there – some neat product, not necessarily the right product.

d
d
10 years ago

For a road bike this might be acceptable.

But because it doesn’t have an axle tying the left and right dropouts together, it is inherently quite weak. I don’t even trust QR skewers and only run bolt-ons or solid axles. This is going in the opposite direction, being weaker than quick release.

d
d
10 years ago

Or maybe i missed something with the limited video footage. Perhaps it is the equivalent of a bolt on. Still, the bolted interface would need to be axle to axle instead of axle to frame. Interesting work though. Cool stuff!

VJGoh
VJGoh
10 years ago

This is custom made for CX. Being able to swap a wheel in and out quickly can save your life if you’re a weekend racer and don’t have someone working the pit for you or a spare bike to switch to.

Kevin Hodgson
Kevin Hodgson
10 years ago

Brilliant. Especially since we’ll all be on thru axles in a few years anyway.

Frank
Frank
10 years ago

@Dude – “re-inventing the wheel” – YES!

Timbo
Timbo
10 years ago

Very cool. I wonder if something similar could happen on the rotor side of disc hubs too. That might go a long way toward addressing the alignment issue with road wheel changes. It seems like centerlock is part of the way there already. Just add some spring-loaded-ness without adding too much weight or hurting stiffness. Easy-peasy.

Blessed be the inventors and tinkerers of the world, for you shall make the impossible possible.

mudrock
mudrock
10 years ago

I’d go for that. Where’s the kickstarter page?

William
William
10 years ago

Google Hub Dock. That guy has the same exact setup, just 5 years earlier.

Mike
Mike
10 years ago

Mmmm… I just carry some disposable plastic gloves. God for other emergencies or even as water proof holders for other things on a wet day.

Robert
Robert
10 years ago

With some more development this could work quite well for road/cx racers. On the mechanics side you would not have to worry about the gearing that each team member is riding as it has no bearing on the wheel only the bike. Nor would the rider have to worry about having a different gearing set up after a flat tire. This same approach could be used on todays MTB bikes with a 12×142 rear. I do not think it would be to difficult to implement.

RIP_Marco
RIP_Marco
10 years ago

Cool! Now Shimano can come out with their proprietary wheel/cassette assembly interface, Campy can have their own, then maybe a RR30, then a RR86, then an EVO, maybe an ISIS, then a pressed in version, etc. etc.

Jiminy
Jiminy
10 years ago

Appreciate the outside the norm thinking but looks like a solution in search of a problem.

Chris L
Chris L
10 years ago

As someone else already pointed out, this is hardly a new concept. Only difference is that this design isn’t nearly as well thought out as the Cinelli design! Cinelli used the name Bivalent because with their system there was no front or rear hub – you just had one hub and it could work on the front or back because the wheel had no dish and was spaced the same. This was especially handy for teams and racers as it halved the number of spare wheels needed. The lack of dish also made for a more durable rear wheel. I owned one and it was a brilliant concept. It largely failed for a few reasons:
1) the freewheel part was made by Regina and the hub part by Campagnolo and neither had much interest in making parts for a new design that could eat into their established product lines.
2) it was considerably more expensive than existing systems.
3) it was completely incompatible with existing systems

Spoke buster
Spoke buster
10 years ago

@Chris

“The lack of dish also made for a more durable rear wheel.”

I had always been lead to believe the opposite. I am curious as to the science behind this statement.

Menga
Menga
10 years ago

Hubdock, Cinelli Bivalent, D-fix. They keep pushing something that no one really needs.

Matt K
Matt K
10 years ago

Excellent invention and well overdue. Yes please and asap!

Bård
Bård
10 years ago

Nice idea, and like the idea of redesigning things that works pretty good from the start of. But don’t see the benifits of removing the wheel without puting the chain on the smaller cog, when you have to spend time screwing out the axel connection. To much time and mechanisms that eventually will break. One thing however is the ease when cleaning the chain drive without the back wheel on, when you have the bike on a working stand. This way you’ll never get grease on the disk.

Nick Hart
Nick Hart
10 years ago

Sorry but Shimano have a patent on something very similar! How old it is I’m not sure.

JasonK
JasonK
10 years ago

Spoke Buster: you’ve misunderstood; Chris is right. By “lack of dish,” Chris means a wheel with equal length spokes on each side. Non-disk front wheels are dishless. The Cinelli Bivalent hubs built into dishless wheels which could be used front or rear. The convention in the bike world is that rims centered between the hub flanges are dishless. It happens to be the opposite of the car world (except not really; in cars this wheel dimension is called offset). Casual car enthusiasts (and serious pizza enthusiasts) sometimes talk about “deep dish wheels,” hence the confusion.

CRBN
CRBN
10 years ago

Weight?!

Brian M
Brian M
10 years ago

I don’t believe this concept is necessarily a product for race teams. Speed of removal is not a significant advantage. A pro team wrench could remove and REPLACE a rear wheel in the time it took to unscrew the QR in the video.

The concept WOULD be really nice for the recreational cyclist (think club riders) who would like to keep hands clean, not mar the chain stay paint job and (like in my case) might like the convenience of stuffing the bike in the back of a very small car and not have a dirty chain dangling around and staining the upholstery. Getting BOTH wheels off the bike and into a small car means not needing a ($$$) bike rack on the roof (where the bike gets doored by garages … we’ve all seen it, right?) or on the tailgate (risk of a rear-end), kills fuel efficiency due to aero-drag and cruds up the bike.

I can see this fitting into the urban/travel bike market as well. But I’d guess Campy and Shimano wouldn’t partner for it for reasons mentioned earlier.

Shimano might however “reinvent” after the patent expires. 😉

Properly designed, there’s no reason it couldn’t be as solid as a thru-axle, and modern CNC machining makes production costs a non-issue if the volume is there.

sgt stiglitz
sgt stiglitz
10 years ago

great. i now have that looped piano tune (bad faux-vintage/sepia toned/silent film effect) stuck in my head.

doot doot doot doot doot doo doo-doo, doot doot doot dooo doooo

repeat.

Dave B
Dave B
10 years ago

The Cinelli system had to be based on 120 mm or more dropout spacing and 5-speed or less freewheels.

I don’t see how it’s possible to build a dishless rear wheel given the width of an 8/9/10-speed freehub body and the constraints of a 130 or even 135 mm dropouts.

dockboy
dockboy
10 years ago

The split axle is a deal breaker for me, and how far will people go to not clean their chain?

trash
trash
10 years ago

use multiple wheelsets with the same cassette, no shifting re-adjustment with wheel change, wheelsets are cheaper with no freehub. Yes, sign me up

Jan
Jan
10 years ago

In the meantime the coupling with the QR-axle is reduced to 3,5 rounds, in the video was this 7.
3,5 is the lenght of a bolt, all the rest is overkill.
Tests are running with a bayonet coupling wich reduces it all to 1/4.
A second spring is also added on the QR so the axle jumps out from the moment the coupling is unscrewed.
Under ALL human power conditions the bending of the axle is less than 0,1 mm. so this is as good as the best traditional system.
Of course the idea was not new, Shimano has got his patent for almost 15 years.
The way this D-Fix is constructed is new according the novelty searches that are been done.
For the moment I’m looking for investors so this will be on the market by summer 2015.

spokes612
spokes612
10 years ago

This isn’t a new concept by any means. As mentioned, Cinelli did it in the 60’s / 70’s and the French did it way before them. Rene Herse was an early pioneer in things like this. Check out this website for a little more info. https://concoursdelegance.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/stay-out-of-problems-dont-get-your-hands-dirty/

Reek Hovac
Reek Hovac
10 years ago

What’s ironic about this video is the piano music is a piece called “Mr. Mealey’s MEDIOCRE Machine” by Kevin MacLeod. (Search YouTube for more info.)

Mindless
Mindless
10 years ago

Cute.

Reek Hovac
Reek Hovac
10 years ago

Best use of the above mentioned piano piece is in a video called “Striped Bass Fishing With a Girl on Lake Lanier/Upper Hooch.”

What?
What?
10 years ago

What is the POE?

michaelonhiscycle
michaelonhiscycle
10 years ago

Hard to tell from a video, i guess you would have to see it properly to know how good/bad/useful it might be
It would make life a lot easier for the replacement of drive side spokes however!

Aaron
Aaron
10 years ago

This is a fantastic concept for 142×12 1/4 turn thru-axles. Wheel changes on disc brake bikes would literally take a second if they used a quarter-turn style mount.

A dinky quick release-sized split axle might not be strong enough to hold up to a lot of abuse without the wheel installed, but a 12mm axle might be.

Imagine the possibilities if you could only have to buy one freehub ever, that had a star-ratchet system that quickly and easily interfaced with any wheel on the market, be it front or rear. No more need to buy specialized freehubs or wheels for different cassettes or drivetrains. Granted, that would mean that forks would have to be redesigned to accomodate the same hub size as the rear… but they already do that on fatbikes.

Of course, this will never happen in the bike industry because nobody wants to cooperate and agree to build things to a certain standard… That would actually make SENSE!

MBR
MBR
10 years ago

Awesome idea! However, this puts the design crux on the axle. Might work on road bikes, but doubtful if a mountain bike axle could be made strong enough to not bend. However, with axle sizes trending larger and larger, might eventually work…

Jan Deckx
Jan Deckx
9 years ago

This is the link to my crowdfunding on, Indiegogo.
Every donation is very welcome.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/d-fix–3/x/9310541

Bike Tinkerer
Bike Tinkerer
8 years ago

Excellent idea. Don’t think the Bivalent idea of front – rear wheel interchangeability is a goer. That was in the days of 5 speed on 100 -120 mm front – rear. The Bivalent just had very shallow dish on both sides: the same as the rear drive side on both sides. Anyway, Jan isn’t proposing this.
The tho-axle, particularly with quarter-turn skewer would make it even better.
Unfortunately this would probably mean a new wider over-lock nut rear fork end standard and frame.
I think even the videoed design would be much quicker than a current QR wheel change.
If practiced and shot in a side of the road comparison situation the viewer wouldn’t see what was happening.
Cynics would then cry slight of hand.
If Contador can win the T de F by 39 seconds from Andy Schleck and loose Paris – Nice by 4 seconds to Geraint Thomas, I would say a quick, reliable wheel change and setting off in a gear selected while coming to a halt is a race winner as well as being more convenient for us lesser mortals.

timmbits
6 years ago

Didn’t Mavic also have a concept like this, in the 80s or 90s?

If you remember, please let me know.
Contact group admin on Velo76.com please (that redirects to my FB group)

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