In talking with my rep, the application for the UDH standard is for the licensing of the UDH branding and not necessarily the use of the UDH standard itself. So you can make a hanger and a dropout that would fit it, but you couldn’t legally put the UDH branding on it or the hanger.
There has been some talk around the existance of some UDH-compatible Shimano DM hangers. But beyond that I’m not sure what the option would be at this time.
The UDH was originally developed to work with Trek Split-Pivot suspension designs. This was the critical limiting case of the UDH design. Also necessary if you want industry-wide adoption unfortunately.
These were the dropouts that I had designed to work with UDH. I’ve tweaked my workflow to work with squared off ends but I know that doesn’t work for everyone. I’ll be working on a second much lighter version later.
Interestingly when you approach it from the standpoint of system weight, they aren’t that far off of the Syntace Dropouts.
