Est. 2022 / Moab, Utah

Two cracked wheels and a bad idea that worked.

Hingeback Off-Road exists because Jake Torrance cracked his third set of wheels on Pritchett Canyon in a single season and his buddy Mitch said, "We could make better ones." They couldn't — at first. But they figured it out.

The Origin Story

It was October 2021 and Jake had just taco'd a $400 cast wheel on a shelf ledge that his JL had cleared a dozen times before. The spoke just gave out — a porosity defect in the casting that the manufacturer's QC missed. It wasn't the first time. The off-road wheel market is full of wheels that look tough and fail in the places where it matters: the microstructure of the aluminum, the quality of the heat treatment, the thickness of the coating.

Mitch Odera had spent 12 years in aerospace manufacturing — first at Alcoa, then at a Tier 1 supplier making forged aluminum components for landing gear. He knew metallurgy. He also knew that the off-road wheel industry was running on decades-old casting techniques while charging premium prices for cool colorways and sponsored Instagram posts.

They started in Mitch's garage in Moab with a simple question: what would an off-road wheel look like if it was designed by people who actually break them? The answer turned out to be Hingeback Off-Road.

The name comes from the hingeback tortoise — a small African tortoise with a shell that has a movable hinge at the back, allowing it to close up completely when threatened. Slow, armored, goes anywhere, and has an engineering feature that nobody else thought of. That felt about right.

What We Actually Do Differently

We test where we live

Our shop is in Moab. Not a suburb of LA. Not a warehouse in Ohio. Moab, Utah — the most demanding off-road terrain in North America. Every wheel we design goes on a rig and runs Hell's Revenge, Pritchett Canyon, and Metal Masher before it goes into production. If a spoke cracks on Moab slickrock, we go back to the CAD file. Our competitors test in labs and on smooth desert hardpack. We test on the rocks that actually break wheels.

Colors you can't get anywhere else

Mojave Green. Burnt Copper. Signal Red. Desert Tan. Arctic White. Six finishes that no other wheel company offers. Not because the colors are hard to make — because nobody else invested in the powder coat R&D to make them durable enough for off-road use. Our multi-stage process (zinc chromate primer, color coat, ceramic-infused UV clear coat) carries a 3-year warranty. Try getting that on a colored wheel from Method or KMC.

The lightest beadlock — on purpose

The HB-850 Lockout weighs 22.4 lbs in 17x9. That's lighter than most non-beadlock cast wheels from our competitors. We didn't achieve that weight by making things thinner — we achieved it by using flow-formed 6061 aluminum for the barrel, which is a fundamentally stronger material that can be run at thinner wall thicknesses. Mitch's aerospace background is the reason we think about grain structure and heat treatment the way other companies think about marketing.

14 people, zero layers

Hingeback is 14 people. Jake and Mitch still answer customer emails. Our lead designer rides with our sponsored KOH team. The person who designed the Venom is the same person who ran it through 600 miles of Baja pre-running. There are no product managers between our engineers and the trail. That's how you end up with the Dune's swappable color rings — a feature that only gets invented by someone who's sick of having one wheel color all year.

The Team

Jake Torrance

Co-Founder & CEO

Former brand manager at Fox Racing. Has broken more wheels than he'd like to admit. Drives a 2-door JL on 37s that he swears is "almost done."

Mitch Odera

Co-Founder & CTO

12 years in aerospace aluminum manufacturing (Alcoa, then Tier 1 landing gear). The reason our specs read like an engineering paper. Drives a 4Runner that looks completely stock.

Rachel Sato

Lead Designer

Industrial design from ArtCenter. Previously designed bicycle components for Enve Composites. The person behind the Venom, Shadow, and Lockout. Co-drives for the KOH team.

Derek Kim

Head of Manufacturing

Managed casting operations at American Racing for 8 years. Brought the flow-forming capability to Hingeback and refuses to let a wheel ship with porosity above 0.5%.

Come see the shop

We're at 487 South Main Street in Moab, right off Highway 191. The door's usually open and there's almost always a rig on the lift. If you're passing through on the way to Arches or Canyonlands, stop in. We'll show you around and you can see the flow-forming machine that makes the Lockout possible.

Hingeback Off-Road

487 South Main Street
Moab, UT 84532

info@hingeback.com
(435) 555-0147