Choose your float: 0°, 10° or 20°. Retrofittable to all DT Ratchet DEG rear hubs too.
Essentially this new thing-ummybob can adjust how quickly your freehub engages. It’s only for DEG flavoured DT rear hubs (it is retrofittable though, which is nice.
With this new DF (Degrees Of Freedom) design, there’s three settings to choose from: 0°, 10° or 20°. Technically you should add the amount of engagement that exists in the DEG hub design also ie. up to 4° (for the 90T ratchet system).
The key thing to note there is the words “up to”. With any engagement there is a window of potential when it comes to when the system engages. On DT DEG hubs the freehub can engage anywhere between 0° and 4°.
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This is why the new DF ‘engagement float’ design is different to just using a hub with a slow engaging freehub (say, freehub with 10° of engagement); sometimes this ‘slow’ hub pickup will engage after 1° of crank turn (for argument’s sake), other times it will take the full 10° of crank turn before the system engages. It varies. It depends where the pawls/teeth are at any one time.
The idea of this new DF design is to offer more consistently ‘slow’ engagement; like a slow freehub that always uses its full float/freestroke of freehub rotation before engaging.
Why? The theory is to ‘free up’ the top length of chain that connects the chainring to the rear cassette, or to put it another way, to ‘free up’ your feet from the rear axle. The theory being that this reduces the effect of the drivetrain upon the rear suspension’s freedom of movement.
In this regard, the DT Swiss DF system is similar to the Sidekick hub from e-thirteen. And it just as simple and easy to adjust too. To swap between quickest pick-up (‘0°’) for when the terrain/course requires such, to the most floaty setting (’20°’) for gravity-centric days, or to the middle setting (’10°) for somewhere in between, it’s a five minute job with the only tool required being an Allen key to remove the rear wheels from the frame.
There was (briefly) an excellent video on DT Swiss’ YouTube channel explaining the DF installation and adjustment but it’s been ‘hidden’ now. Hopefully it will return now that the embargo time is up.
When you stop pedalling, the drag in the system resets things. There are no additionals components (springs, elastomers etc). “To reset the DF system … it’s simply the rotation of the wheel during freewheeling and the drag from the pressure of the springs on the ratchets that forces the DF system
backwards into reset or disengaged mode.”
What the new DT Swiss DF system is not, is a chain damper. So it’s not the same thing as an O-Chain or a Rimpact Chain Damper. Those devices are designed to calm down ‘chain flail’ (the chain bouncing around and effecting the suspension and/or bike’s feel) as well as reduce pedal-kickback. Such devices also ‘soften’ the moment of drivetrain engagement when you do go to pedal. The new DT Swiss DF system – like the e-thirteen Sidekick – will have a ‘hard’ start/engagement.
So yeah, this is not quite the same as a much more expensive O-Chain/Rimpact system, but it is a cool thing to see from DT Swiss. It’s a bit cheaper (€129.00), simpler, lighter, easy to adjust and retro-fittable.
Anyway, we’ve got hold of a DT Swiss DF and will be installing it into a DT DEG rear wheel and giving it a thorough testing. Watch this space…
Spares. Â Most of the work is done by the steel springs of which there is a lighter ‘trail’ option available but not supplied with the device. If you have one to test and are finding it unpleasant to pedal you may like to investigate this option with Rimpact
Just ordered one of these, well a new whole wheel and upgraded hub. It’s a bit messy as you can’t buy the hub in a 157 and HG, so you need an XD then a freehub in HG and then swap the bits over and upgrade to the DF system