Industry Nine Hydra 2 Longish Term Review: Rules of Engagement

Words & Photos by Jared Erickson

Earlier this year, Industry Nine launched the highly anticipated Hydra 2 hubs, building off their legendary Hydra hubs and addressing some key areas that riders had some concerns over. The question is, did they successfully address those concerns or not?

Before we talk about the Hydra 2s, we need to go back to the original Hydra hubs and see what they did right and what could have been improved. 690 points of instant engagement and that classic i9 buzz was enough to intoxicate riders all over the world, and these hubs found themselves on bikes everywhere from Tulsa to Timbuktu. Unfortunately, these hubs were plagued with some issues including some premature bearing wear and fragile hub axles that left some riders with a sour taste in their mouth. This was enough for some riders to look elsewhere for their hub needs, even with i9s dedication to quality, precision engineering and manufacturing. After personally suffering from a broken axle or two as well as some premature bearing wear on a couple sets of I9 wheels, (which i9 was happy to warranty) I was looking forward to trying out these new and improved hubs and putting them through the wringer.

Enter the Hydra 2. Industry Nine has allegedly learned from their mistakes, claiming “Hydra2 features a newly designed 65% thicker axle, larger 6903 bearings with new labyrinth seals, and enlarged pawl pockets that ensure bombproof durability under the most demanding conditions.” Clearly addressing the issues they experienced from the gen 1 Hydras, it’s refreshing to see a company acknowledge and face these issues head on as opposed to subtly hinting that they are “new and improved.” So, have they truly addressed these issues and how have these hubs held up under our abuse?

To put it simply - so far, so good. We’ve been thrashing a set of the Hydra 2s laced up to a Grade 300 wheel utilizing Industry Nine's proprietary straight pull aluminum spokes, a part of their system wheels. We figured there was no better platform to test a hub than the most powerful eMTBs on the market, so after spinning for nearly a thousand miles on our Amflow PL and Crestline S180 eMTBs, the bearings are still spinning perfectly smoothly, we have no broken axles to report, and the wheels are spinning true as ever. Happy days. After putting these wheels and hubs through some absurdly insane power inputs and plenty of thrashing on our harshest trails from our most abusive riders, they have come out the other end as good as new. We’re not sure we could say the same if we had put the original Hydras through the same beating.

Final Thoughts

All in all, are these improvements enough for Industry Nine to have redeemed themselves? I’d have to say yes. These new bearings, axles and seals combined with the legendary telepathic engagement make these hubs a contender once again, and give DT Swiss a run for their money in the durability department. Now you can have your cake and eat it, too.