Many of the shop employee builds are dreamed up but toned down once it comes time to buy parts. This time though, Ben took his time to build the perfect bike. The perfect bike needs the perfect pair of shoes, and Ben outdid himself here.
Starting with Chris King hubs is always a good idea, especially when they are gold. The front is the oversize 20mm thru-axle version of their 6-bolt disc hub. King makes two versions of their front disc hub for thru-axles. The oversize version is ready for 20mm or 15mm thru-axles, but is slightly heavier than the standard hub shell. Though, the standard hub shell won't accept 20mm axles, which Ben needed in this instance.
The rear hub is set up for a 12mm thru-axle, though it still includes the Chris King "buzz" these hubs are so well known for. I was recently anointed into the world of thru-axles on the front of my Niner, I can only imagine the stiffness the rear of this bike will have with a thru-axle in the rear hub as well.
Ben went with NoTubes Flow rims, an excellent choice. The Flow is a relatively light rim, but extremely burly. It also offers plenty of stiffness, but more importantly is extremely wide and should offer up top-notch tubeless compatibility.
Set up with yellow rim tape, these should work well tubeless and set up easily. The NoTubes system is the best I've worked with so far, but with a number of other systems popping up we can hope they'll get even better with time.
Gold alloy nipples finish off this build. It's more likely that if we were building for a customer we would have used brass nipples for their strength, but with a full-service bike shop at his disposal every day and the ability to fix just about anything, alloy nipples will most likely work just fine and will of course look the part.
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