Per
[email protected]:
>> Wound up with two of them... and I'm never going back.
>
>Thought you liked them. I was just caught out by your comment about the
>weight of the Rohloffs, sounding negative. I still have reservations
>(mainly the noise, TBH, but also weight distribution rather than
>absolute weight per se), but think that's the way I'll go.
My stock spiel is that they're heavy, noisy, less efficient, ungodly expensive;
I recently bought my second one; and I don't ever want to ride with anything
else.
To break it down:
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1) The weight for me is moot. A Rohloff replacing a SRAM 9.0 der system
adds almost exactly 2 pounds to the bike.
A guy who races once told me that the extra two pounds would make him
non-competitive on the hills.
But I weigh 220; I'm a pathetic rider; I'm in no hurry; and 2 pounds
is a really small percent of my body weight.
2) The noise diminishes after the first thousand or so miles and you get
used to what remains. Also the noise is concentrated in gears 1-7.
8-14 are almost silent.
3) I've seen a couple of technical studies on efficiency. What I take away from
them is that real-life comparison is difficult. Chain angles, cleanliness of
the system, lubrication... and so-forth.
The diff differs depending on gear. The max diff is something on the order of
one or two percent in a few of the gears against a virgin, perfectly-clean,
perfectly-adjusted high-end der setup.
I think gear 11 is direct drive. Partially by design and partially by
chance, I've geared one of my bikes so that 11 matches my flat/paved
cruising speed.
4) As far as the expense goes, I can't say much - except that I spend quite a
bit of time on my bikes and a couple hundred bucks either way gets amortized.
Geeze, I just spend over a grand on a little electrical generator to keep
the contents of the freezer/fridge from spoiling and to let me do some work
during power failures. This thing is going to get used how often? Maybe
twice a year for a couple of days?
Also, nobody lives forever and I don't want my kids to have *too* much fun
with my hard-earned cash.
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For the kind of trekking that I've seen on the TracksterMan web site, it seems
like an internally-geared hub might be a good fit.
The plus side is that it doesn't seem to me like they break down. Personally,
I'd put a new set of shifter cables on it before a big trip.
OTOH, I've never broken a shifter cable... although I've replaced a couple that
were getting frayed down inside the little box that attaches to the hub.
OTOOH, if a cable were to break, you could still run different gears by just
putting a 9mm wrench to the shifter interface bolt on the hub - as opposed to
a der system where I'd guess you'd be stuck with one gear - or as many
gears as were available by shifting the front rings.
The minus side would be that if, for some unforeseen reason, there was a problem
you wouldn't be replacing/fixing it with locally-available parts.
--
PeteCresswell