You can build a factory. You can buy machines. You can plan production. But expertise? That’s a different story. You can’t buy it. Expertise has to grow. And growing it takes time – sometimes generations. It can’t be rushed, or forced into a spreadsheet, but it thrives in an ecosystem of complementary skills. And just as slowly as it develops, it can vanish in the blink of an eye. We’re standing in a place where expertise has grown: Welcome to Markina-Xemein, in the Basque province of Bizkaia.
If a quiz show asked for one of Europe’s oldest industrial regions, shouting “The Basque Country!” probably wouldn’t win over the audience. But there’s more to Euskadi than just rugged coastline and overcooked cheesecake. Deep in the evergreen hills, the Basques were extracting iron ore as far back as the 12th century, smelting it in rudimentary clay furnaces. Right alongside, a thriving tradition of metalworking began to develop, evolving into huge industrial operations.
Fast forward to today, and the Basque Country is a cutting-edge industrial hub. Engineering, aerospace, automotive (and yes, the bike industry too) have made this autonomous region in northern Spain a true insider’s tip for those seeking precision manufacturing and top-tier metalworking expertise.
Collective Success – OQUO Wheels is a Cooperative
After a short night in Vitoria-Gasteiz, followed by a long drive north through the mountains, I find myself standing in front of a nondescript nave on an unremarkable industrial estate – the home of OQUO Wheels. A nave is an industrial hall or warehouse. But it’s also the central aisle of a church. And a spaceship? That’s a nave too. And in truth, OQUO’s ambitions fit rather well under that shared roof: deep local manufacturing know-how, a near-evangelical obsession with production tolerances and finish quality – and a hint of science fiction.
Oquo sprung to life as a spin-off from Orbea but places a strong emphasis on operating independently. Like many Basque brands, it is run as a cooperative. Every employee can become a shareholder. Pay is based on transparent salary bands, and decisions about whether to reinvest profits or distribute them are made collectively. The company belongs to its workers. It might seem a bit cumbersome or consensus-heavy at first glance, but the model works.
With so much textbook entrepreneurship on display, you’d expect the letters OQUO to be proudly plastered across the roof. The fact that they’re not comes down to a sad reality: the fear of bike-savvy thieves. Behind the plain façade lies a real treasure trove – carbon fibre rims, CNC-machined hub shells, and, above all, hard-earned expertise.
Seamlessly Satisfied – OQUO’s Q10 Hub Aims to Impress With Manufacturing Quality
Inside the development lab, I’m hopelessly out of my depth. Engagement angles, pawl profiles, aluminium alloys… Juan Carlos Cambronero, Wheel Engineering Manager at OQUO, hits me with a rapid-fire crash course in hub design, delivered in an enthusiastic Spanish-English staccato. My brain waves the white flag.
A few café solos later, the fragments begin to fall into place. The reason for the team’s excitement goes by the name Q10. No, Q10 isn’t a droid from the latest Star Wars sequel. It’s a hub – but not just any hub. It’s the first fully in-house developed hub from OQUO. And it’s not just designed in the Basque Country, it’s actually manufactured right here too.
The hub shell, axle and freehub components are all produced locally by OQUO and their nearby suppliers, then assembled by hand. Only the bearings are sourced from a partner in Japan.
When you look at manufacturing from the outside, production sites can seem quite nondescript and interchangeable – easy to scale up, scale down or relocate in the name of cost savings. But the reality is a bit more complicated. Not everything is replaceable or relocatable.
Juan Carlos dismantles a hub in front of me, showing how the various components interlock. I nod, impressed. Is that the new OQUO-Hub? He shakes his head firmly. It’s from a competitor. Only now does the Q10 take centre stage. And there’s a noticeable difference – the precision fit of the parts is on another level. The freehub slides almost seamlessly into the champagne-coloured hub shell. It’s oddly satisfying. I’m beginning to understand what OQUO mean when they talk about local manufacturing expertise.
The explanation pace picks up again: eight degrees engagement angle, ceramic-coated surfaces, and a hub shell CNC-machined from solid 7075-T6 aluminium. It’s hard to quantify the advantages of all these features, but one thing is obvious: every single detail has been examined, questioned and refined – even down to ease of maintenance. The Q10 can be completely stripped and reassembled without tools. That also makes it easier to apply OQUO’s own custom-blended grease. Depending on how generously you apply it, the freehub sound changes. But even at its loudest, the mechanism inside that finely laser-etched casing stays relatively subdued – much to the annoyance of some Tour de France pros, as we discovered at the Grand Départ in Lille.
Role Play – A Wheel’s Life on the Test Bench
The Q10 hub is the centrepiece of OQUO’s new Ltd wheels. The Ltd Wheels form a dedicated road range, complemented by the gravel-oriented RP50 Ltd. Mounted on the Orbea Terra Race, the wheels have already hinted at what they’re capable of once the tarmac ends.
But before any wheel gets a shot at the podium, it has to prove itself on the test bench. Every new development goes through a multi-stage testing process. Step one is UCI approval. To assess the basic impact resistance of a wheelset, the world governing body uses a standard test that sounds like it came straight out of a medieval torture chamber: a silicone-coated steel block is dropped onto a bare carbon rim with 40 joules of force. It sounds pretty brutal, but it’s all in the name of safety. If the rim survives without visible damage, it gets the UCI stamp of approval.
That said, this test has little in common with the real-world stresses of everyday riding on tarmac or gravel, and it says next to nothing about long-term durability. That’s why most brands have developed their own in-house procedures and testing standards. At OQUO, everything revolves around the drum – or rather, the dynamic drum test bench. Tire pressure, rider weight, speed – the team led by Quality Manager Aitor Juaristi simulates a wheelset’s entire service life using a precise mix of these parameters. Every prototype has to complete the equivalent of 50,000 kilometres on the road. Then it’s time for the teardown: hubs dismantled, rims X-rayed.
The same goes for the wheels that make their way back to the Basque Country at the end of the WorldTour season. Since the start of the 2025 season, OQUO wheels have been spinning on the bikes of the Belgian Lotto team. But for the team back in Markina-Xemein, it’s not just about chasing visibility or wins – it’s about gaining insights. A wheelset that’s survived a winter of road salt, a spring of cobbles and a summer riding the grand tours is pure gold for OQUO: a piece of rolling real-world data.
It offers insights into stress, wear and material behaviour that no software can replicate. Combined with rider and team feedback – especially when it comes to stiffness, aerodynamics and handling – these findings feed directly into the development of the next wheel generation. And that takes time. In the case of the OQUO Ltd wheels, it took three years to turn the concept into a finished product.
Smart Spannering – At OQUO Mechanics Team Up With Tech
If you think carbon wheel-building means autoclaves and carbon moulds, you’re in for a rude awakening. At OQUO, the team defines the rim characteristics – things like profile shapes and target-weights – but the rims themselves are produced in Asia.
In Europe, in-house carbon manufacturing has become rare, limited to just a handful of brands and manufacturers. The bulk of the expertise in carbon layup lies firmly in Asia, where carbon fibre components are produced in scalable volumes with consistently high quality – at a price that simply can’t be matched under European labour costs. Despite all of the technology involved, carbon production remains heavily reliant on manual work.
It’s reassuring to know that the same still applies to wheel building. At least with the high-end models, most of the work is done by hand. The process starts with the spokes being slotted into the hub, threaded through the rim and secured with nipples. But the real magic happens once the wheel is in the truing stand. The spoke tension is gradually increased, while sensors monitor the trueness of the rim, with live data displayed on a screen. Even the smallest deviations – whether lateral or radial – trigger a red warning if they exceed the tight tolerance of just a fraction of a millimetre. Only when the display turns green is the wheel cleared to leave the stand.
Every wheel is documented with its specific spoke tension, trueness values and the name of the person who built it. In practice, that often means the builders keep fine-tuning even after the truing light has long gone green.
The Wheel-building Waltz
Couldn’t a machine do all this more precisely? No. Because building a good wheel isn’t as simple as applying the same number of nipple turns to every spoke. Every rim has its own quirks, each spoke varies ever so slightly in length, and no two nipples are exactly alike. Automation doesn’t make a great wheel – it’s rather the result of an iterative, intuitive process of tension and release.
The true craft lies in gradually dialing in a perfectly true rim, spoke by spoke, using feel and instinct – all while maintaining as even a spoke tension as possible across the entire wheel. A three-quarter turn here, an eighth back there. It’s a delicate process, a slow waltz, with a touch of old-school workshop romance. But at OQUO, this delicate dance happens at high speed, on a grand scale.
OQUO are far from a niche operation: 100 employees, eight production lines and around 1,500 wheels leaving the factory each day. Their portfolio spans everything from entry-level aluminium models with externally sourced hubs, to premium high-profile Ltd wheels built around their own Q10 hubs.
So could all of this be done in Asia? In theory, perhaps. But OQUO’s strengths lie elsewhere – right here, in fact. In flexibility, in a deep commitment to the sport, and in the ability to respond quickly when supply chains tighten, or market demands shift. And above all, in their expertise, says Juan Carlos with a smile as he seamlessly slots the freehub into the hub one last time.
Open the door at some wheel brands, and you’ll find little more than a marketing machine, dressed up with a hint of in-house development. As for production? Fully outsourced. OQUO Wheels take a different approach. With real conviction and attention to detail, the Basque brand explores new ideas, gathers feedback, manufactures their own components, and builds complete wheelsets from the ground up. Locally. In the Basque Country. As a collective.
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Words: Nils Hofmeister Photos: Nils Hofmeister
