KOM is based in the Peak District; home to some of the best natural mountain bike trails in the UK. With 30 years of working in the aeronautical industry, we started King Of the Mountain with the know-how and experience to make faster, stronger and lighter products that last and last. 

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All of us at KOM are keen mountain bikers with a long history of riding in the Peaks.

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"Necessity is the mother of invention." 

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As our rides became more frequent and much tougher on our bikes the failure rates of our components increased and became really annoying. (As were the long walks home.) Our main issue was with unreliable, poorly designed hubs. Despite the makers calling themselves 'high quality manufacturers', our frequent broken axles, broken ratchets and pulled out spokes lead to an ever expanding pile of dead wheels.

The necessity for something better became blindingly obvious. Hubs needed to be improved and so began the task of understanding and redesiging...

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There are an array of issues with the current selection of 'legacy' hubs on the market. Many suffer from problems such as broken axles, broken ratchets, premature bearing wear etc. But why?  After looking really closely at the performance and design of existing hubs, it became easier to understand why and how they failed. Obvious weak points are effectively baked into an industry wide basic standard 'legacy' design.

Some hubs are worse than others but in the worst cases there are vital parts that wear out or break that just can't be repaired or replaced.  That's another thing that we felt really needed fixing!

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"Starting with a blank sheet"

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  It sound exciting but we didn't really know what a long journey we were embarking on.  Despite that, "Starting with a blank sheet," does have some major advantages:  We were not tied into the blickered view "We've always made them like that," so we didn't feel we had to do the same as everybody else.

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Instead, we were able to start with engineering best practice rather than accountancy demanding lowest cost and lowest risk.  

This enabled a revolutionary design to cristalize and then the first protoypes were incorporated into our bikes.  Our first prototype hub was fitted to a bike almost 8 years old. That's 25,000- 30,000km down the road and it's still going strong. It's used almost every day and it's still on original bearings and of course the original axle too.

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So we managed to solve our most pressing riding equipment issues, but it took us years.  We've made hubs that are far stronger, do not break axles and with bearings that last many times longer.  Now we've we set out to make it available to you too.

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Another great outcome of our revolutionary design is that while massively reducing bearing wear we also massively reduced rolling friction.  (When you say it like that it's a bit more obvious: friction and wear really are two sides of the same coin.) 

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Many new customers, with KOM hubs, say they can feel the difference straight away.  But, it does help to see it with your own eyes, so look out on-line for real life KOM rolling tests.

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Enjoy your new KOM hubs, your riding buddies will have to pedal even harder to keep up with you now!