Hub Polishers Shmub Sholishers

Sometimes when you buy a trendy fixed gear or look at old photos of tourers from the golden days you see a little strip of leather affixed around one or both hubs.

This is a hub polisher. It's job is to keep the center of the hub clean.

It probably looks like a pretty dumb invention, and admittedly it isn't particularly useful on modern bikes because there isn't any good reason to keep the center of your hub clean, except for aesthetics.

The hub polisher is a vestige of the past, of a time when hubs were designed and serviced differently than now.

Classic high-quality hubs, like the '70's era Campy Records below, feature a hole in the center of the hub. This is so that the mechanic can refresh lubricant without taking the hub apart.

On either end of the hub, the bearing shields will also have little exit ports for the old lube to ooze out of. This concept is still used by Speedplay for their road pedals, where old grease gushes out the spindle end when new grease is injected through the center hole.

The hub polisher is necessary because the lube used back when these campy hubs were made was more liquidy than modern types. A bit of black lube tended to leak out of the service hole during regular riding, and especially after a grease refresh. The hub polisher, then, could straddle the service hole and wipe away any errant grease. This also helps to keep dirt from infiltrating the hole and contaminating the bearings.

With modern, sealed bearings and sticky, long lasting grease, the hub service hole is obsolete, and thus so is the hub polisher.

I like to keep mine around though. It saves 20 seconds of effort whenever I clean my wheels every month or so.