Minnesota machining, Enve engineering: inside Wolf Tooth’s first hubs

Wolf Tooth Hub — (Image credit: Anne-Marije Rook)

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Hub pricing
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First Impressions

Wolf Tooth is making hubs now, and they’re as pretty as you’d expect. Rounded aluminium barrels with angular spoke mounts and simple white branding. With six colours at launch, here's yet another opportunity to carry a personal touch throughout your build.

For a recent build – a silver Blackheart Road Plus – I opted for blue. It started with the little details: matching rotor lockrings, a headset cover, bottom bracket, seatpost collar and even bottle cage bolts. Now, the hubs carry that same splash of colour into the wheels. It’s enough to make the bike feel uniquely mine.

There is, of course, plenty of competition for colourful bits. Chris King, White Industries, Industry Nine and Hope have long given wheel buyers reasons to stray from black. Wolf Tooth’s Kurt Stafki readily acknowledged the established players, but said the new hubs have more to offer than just a splash of colour.

The Hubs

Wolf Tooth today launched its hub range with three models:

Straight-pull road/gravel: 24-hole drilling; claimed weight of 326g per pair.
Straight-pull XC/trail MTB Boost: 28-hole drilling; claimed weight of 371g per pair.
J-bend MTB Boost: intended for aggressive trail through downhill riding; 28- or 32-hole drilling; claimed weight of 442g per pair.

All hub shells are machined in-house in Minnesota from 7075-T6 aluminium and come in black, red, blue, gold, orange and ultraviolet purple, with more colours promised.

Once you’ve settled on a model and colour, there’s another choice to make: how quickly you want the rear hub to engage when you start pedalling again.

Enve’s Innerdrive mechanism uses two facing toothed rings. Their teeth engage when you pedal, transferring your effort to the wheel. When you coast, the teeth slip past one another, producing the familiar freehub buzz.

Wolf Tooth offers 40-, 60-, 80- and 100-tooth options. More teeth mean less movement before the mechanism engages—useful when picking your way through technical terrain or getting back on the power out of a corner. Wolf Tooth says fewer teeth reduce drag while coasting.

The road/gravel hubs come with the lighter 40T Pro ratchet. Riders who prioritise quicker engagement can move up the tooth counts, with the 60T and 80T options sitting between the two extremes.

Why Wolf Tooth chose Enve after protoyping its own system

That choice of ratchets was only one reason Wolf Tooth set aside its own internal design in favour of INNERDRIVE.

"We spent a long, long time testing hubs, including our own internal design, which we tested and prototyped alongside existing options," said Wolf Tooth’s Marketing Manager Zach Dolinaj.

Testing took in Minnesota’s distinct seasons, including what the company calls "Salt Season," when road salt joins the moisture and grime. If you want to know how bearings and seals cope when conditions turn unpleasant, Minnesota gives you plenty to work with.

"Choosing INNERDRIVE gives us what we believe is the most balanced, high-performance hub available, focusing on bearing load/life, robustness of the drive mechanism, POE options, weight, and serviceability," Dolinaj said.

Inside the shiny exterior, INNERDRIVE's large, opposing toothed ratchets sit over the bearings, which is meant to reduce stress on the axle and bearings to help prolong their life.

Then there’s bearing preload: the small amount of force applied to take up play in the bearings. Too much can add friction and accelerate wear; too little can leave unwanted movement. INNERDRIVE's Perfect Preload system handles that adjustment with a wave washer. Tighten the end cap to the specified torque, and the system sets the preload for you.

Thanks to these features, Wolf Tooth says maintenance requires no special tools. Riders can swap ratchets to change engagement, while a retaining circlip keeps the freehub and ratchets in place during servicing.

These practical touches continue in the rest of the hub design. Standardised bearing sizes across the front and rear hubs simplify sourcing replacements, while consistent spoke lengths within each wheelset make keeping spares more straightforward.

None of this has the immediate appeal of, say, purple anodising, but it helps explain what Wolf Tooth means by hubs that are "easy to live with".

So why choose these over Enve’s own hubs? Colour, customisability and domestic production, argued Stafki.

"Compared to Enve, customers will be able to ride with a Made-in-the-USA hubshell, with colour options and ratchet selection based on style and preference," he said.

Enve technology, open for licensing

For Enve, supplying the technology represents a reversal of roles. Before developing a drive mechanism of its own, the company used Mavic’s ID360 in its hubs. It knows the appeal of building around an existing design as well as the large amount of work involved in creating an alternative.

Enve’s VP of Product, Jake Pantone, said INNERDRIVE took roughly two years to develop before launching in 2024. Wolf Tooth’s decision to license it is therefore a particular kind of endorsement: a fellow manufacturer tested the alternatives, including its own prototypes, and chose Enve’s engineering instead.

“We've opened the technology up for licensing, and so we've licensed it to BMC, to Wolf Tooth, and there's a handful of other brands who are looking at the opportunity to use INNER DRIVE,” Pantone shared.

That raises an obvious question: does Enve want its internals inside everyone else’s hubs?

"Right now we're not necessarily looking to be a DT Swiss, like we're not looking to grow and establish a hub business unit per se."

Pantone described licensing as validation rather than a revenue driver. The development effort was first and foremost about producing a dependable mechanism for Enve’s own wheels. Having another manufacturer choose it gives that work a life beyond Enve’s product range.

“We really believe INNERDRIVE is a really nice, simple, low-maintenance system. And so it was great that someone like Wolf Tooth recognised that and wanted to use that same drive mechanism."

Hub pricing

At launch, hubs will be shipping worldwide from the Wolf Tooth website, and are also available internationally via its distributor and dealer networks.

Front: $239.95 USD / £205 / €270
Rear: $489.95 USD / £410 / €540
The set: $729.90 USD / £615 / €810

Wheelset options

Wolf Tooth is selling seven in-house wheelset options featuring the new hubs:

Enve SES 4.5 - $2950
Enve G SES 4.5 - $2950
We Are One Whisp - $1975
We Are One Triad 29" and Mullet - $1975
Enve M6 - $2400
Enve M8 - $2400

First Impressions

I've been riding the blue Wolf Tooth hubs laced into Enve SES 4.5 rims since late July. Sunny, dry late-summer miles are hardly Minnesota’s "Salt Season", so any verdict on bearing life will have to wait. I have, however, used INNERDRIVE in Enve wheels previously without issue, which gives me confidence in the mechanism inside these new shells.

The looks certainly deliver. I like the hub's angular shapes and the way the machining gives the hubs character beyond their colour. Alongside the matching Wolf Tooth details elsewhere on my Blackheart, they make the build feel uniquely mine. The finish remains pristine, too, without a scratch or ding despite some questionable off-road choices.

Enve says it has no plans to offer colourful hubs itself, so this is one way to bring that personal touch to an Enve-equipped build.

Freehub sound is personal, but with the 40T Pro ratchet fitted, this setup sits on the quieter end of the spectrum with just a pleasing buzz.

Wolf Tooth sent along alternative ratchets to try, and swapping them was remarkably painless. I particularly appreciate the retained internals. With other systems, I've misplaced a spring or two when the freehub body came away while swapping cassettes or changing a tyre. And watching Keegan Swenson search for lost freehub springs in the gravel at Unbound this year only reinforced the appeal of keeping those small parts in place. To me, it's an easily overlooked but much-appreciated detail.

At $729.90 for the set, Wolf Tooth's hubs are close in price to White Industries’ offerings, and below Chris King’s $890 R45D Centerlock pairing. It’s very much a premium purchase, but priced in familiar territory for riders considering colourful hubs for a custom build.

With wetter weather approaching all too soon, I’ll continue testing these in less favourable conditions. For now, Wolf Tooth’s distinctive machining, coordinated colours and straightforward ratchet swaps are a compelling package.

Cycling Weekly's North American Editor, Anne-Marije Rook is old school. She holds a degree in journalism and started out as a newspaper reporter — in print! She can even be seen bringing a pen and notepad to the press conference.

Originally from the Netherlands, she grew up a bike commuter and didn't find bike racing until her early twenties when living in Seattle, Washington. Strengthened by the many miles spent darting around Seattle's hilly streets on a steel single speed, Rook's progression in the sport was a quick one. As she competed at the elite level, her journalism career followed, and soon, she became a full-time cycling journalist. She's now been a journalist for two decades, including 14 years in cycling.