It is sometimes difficult for me to know just exactly what the correct name is for some Chinese companies. This page is dedicated to a company that I know as 'Wheel Top' that makes a bewildering range of chainsets for everything from tiny children's bikes to top-end-road-speed-machines.

So far, so simple. However, the relevant patents are assigned to 'Lanxi Wheel Top Cycle Industry Limited' or 'Lanxi Zhixingyun Sports Tech Company Limited'. And, even more excitingly, an instruction book lists the manufacturer as 'Lanxi Super Smart Cycling Cloud Sports Science and Technology Company Limited'. Someone is surely taking the piss.

Whatever its true name may be, the company is based in Lanxi, a city south west of Shanghai, China. The company's website claims that it was founded in 1951. This is an interesting date, only 2 years after the Proclamation of the People's Republic. Wheel Top appears to have survived theGreat Leap Forward, the Backyard Blast Furnaces, the Blooming of a Hundred Flowers, the Cultural Revolution and the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square. And through all this tumult it was quietly manufacturing chainsets.

Wheel Top is included on this website because it has been developing derailleurs since, at least, 2014. It showed a, rather impressive, prototype of an electronic derailleur at the Taipei Cycle Show in 2019. It then appeared to launch the production version, called the Wheel Top EDS OX at Eurobike in 2022. The whole launch was a trifle strange as the derailleur became unavailable almost immediately. This could be because the Marketing Department was more enthusiastic than the Production reality (imagine!), or it could be because it was launched for OEM customers, with after-market sales a distant priority, or, regrettably, it could be that Wheel Top may have been patent bombed by SRAM or Shimano (or both).

Whatever the reason, I hope that Wheel Top eventually manage to get significant quantities of their fine device to market.