Chris King headsets- Say that and everyone knows what you are talking about. Well, if they are really bike gear freaks, then they do for sure. The traditional cup and bearing headset in a wide array of anodized colors. Yeah, that’s it….Chris King!

The classic King head set

Well, the days of the “traditional” style head set being the obvious choice are, (or already have, depending upon your point of view), slipping away. Chris King head sets, for lack of a better way to put it, were in danger of becoming “old school” as integrated and semi-integrated head sets took over more and more of the new frame business. Several fans of Chris King head sets were wondering if King would ever enter the “internal” head set arena. It seemed an unlikely prospect, given the “position paper” that has been up on the King website since about 2000 that fairly denegrated the whole idea of internal head sets. However; Chris King did design and make open to the industry a standard for an internal headset called “Perdido” which never really seemed to catch on. The Perdido quietly went away, and it seemed that King would stay the course of “traditional” head sets in the future.

Well, now it seems that they are about to do something that will bring Chris King back into the integrated head set arena, albeit with a bit of a twist. King will not only design a new “semi-integrated” head set, it will also sell it with a head tube designed specifically for it. For the reasoning behind that, one only need to pay close attention to this statement discussing the Columbus integrated head set, found in the Chris King article “Headsets- Integrated Headsets Explained” dated March 2002:

This is certainly better than a bearing rubbing around loose in the frame, but this system again relies on the frame builder to make that head tube perfectly. We manufacture our headset cups to within .0005″ accuracy in order to correctly control the bearing’s location and press fit. Frame builders typically hold about .005″ accuracy at best. This is 10 times less accurate than a conventional headset cup and while it is perfectly fine for building a frame, it just is not close enough for holding a bearing in place properly.

So, with Chris King controlling the tolerances of the head tube and the head set itself, one would assume that the modular approach is being pusued to satisfy the high tolerances that Chris King desires to achieve before they would put such a head set out with their logo on it. The name for this project that The Bike Lab has seen leaked is “Inset” and we will be looking for more on this at the North American Handmade Bicyle Show in late February.

Stay tuned for more….