Electronic Shifting Replay

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 10:27:47 AM UTC-5, Andre Jute wrote:

I've never been paid by the word, but Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick were...

LoL! Don't forget L. Ron Hubbard, who is reported to have said:
"Writing (science fiction) for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion."
:-

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 3:55:46 PM UTC+1, Rolf Mantel wrote:

Changing the oil bath of my Rohloff first time after some 5 years did
give me a massive speed boost, like pumping up the tires from 20 to 80
psi (I should have changed that oil a lot earlier).

The official service interval is 5000km/3000m or every year. Careful owners make two oil changes on a new box in the first year.

I must admit I asked the bike dealer to do the oil change for me so I
don't know.

That may account for the dangerous misconceptions in the rest of this, that you never had to read the manual.

I believe Rohloff used to recommend change between "summer" and "winter"
oil but at least once per year in the past.

Maybe before my time. What Rohloff actually prescribes is that you clean out the old oil and grunge with "cleaning oil", which also does duty as "extreme low tempertature oil", drink the concoction, and fill with "all-seasons oil", which also does duty as "summer oil", once a year or every 3000m/5000km. Also after the hub has been underwater, as in crossing a river.

Then they put an "all-year"
oil to market, and I vaguely recall to have read something that at least
in the first year an oil change would be quite important.

That's an *extra* oil change in addition to the normal schedule, to help get any bits of steel knocked of handfitted gears out of the box.

On the German bike forums, some people mention that the relevant part
would be more an "oil topup" rather than an "oil change" and the hub
gets louder and loses efficiency when lacking oil.

Rohloff hubs apparently leave the factory with 12ml of all-seasons oil adhering to the gears, and this is all that is necessary. The official service amount is 25ml to ensure that even newbies put in enough oil, but that causes oil to mist out and perhaps even drip, because the Rohloff isn't a sealed gearbox at all -- it would weigh too much if it were. Experienced owners, who buy both oils in bulk, put in 14ml of all seasons oil after cleaning the box every year or 5000m. The "oil top-up" arises from the knowledge that some oil sticks to the gears even after the cleaning oil/old oil mix is drained, plus whatever fresh all-seasons oil you put in, a basically unknowable amount if you insist on precision. There's a thread on the "slippery math" of Rohloff oil changes here that might amuse you:
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=11786.0
And here, after ten years of Rohloff ownership, is my conclusion on "Power-servicing your Rohloff":
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=13327.0

Andre Jute
2+2 equals ? That depends on whether you are British, French, German or Italian.

Oops! Screwed by the automatic spellchecker -- again! Of course I don't intend for you to drink the dirty oil but to drain it. -- AJ

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 5:07:55 PM UTC+1, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 3:55:46 PM UTC+1, Rolf Mantel wrote:

Changing the oil bath of my Rohloff first time after some 5 years did
give me a massive speed boost, like pumping up the tires from 20 to 80
psi (I should have changed that oil a lot earlier).

The official service interval is 5000km/3000m or every year. Careful owners make two oil changes on a new box in the first year.

I must admit I asked the bike dealer to do the oil change for me so I
don't know.

That may account for the dangerous misconceptions in the rest of this, that you never had to read the manual.

I believe Rohloff used to recommend change between "summer" and "winter"
oil but at least once per year in the past.

Maybe before my time. What Rohloff actually prescribes is that you clean out the old oil and grunge with "cleaning oil", which also does duty as "extreme low tempertature oil", drink the concoction, and fill with "all-seasons oil", which also does duty as "summer oil", once a year or every 3000m/5000km. Also after the hub has been underwater, as in crossing a river.

Then they put an "all-year"
oil to market, and I vaguely recall to have read something that at least
in the first year an oil change would be quite important.

That's an *extra* oil change in addition to the normal schedule, to help get any bits of steel knocked of handfitted gears out of the box.

On the German bike forums, some people mention that the relevant part
would be more an "oil topup" rather than an "oil change" and the hub
gets louder and loses efficiency when lacking oil.

Rohloff hubs apparently leave the factory with 12ml of all-seasons oil adhering to the gears, and this is all that is necessary. The official service amount is 25ml to ensure that even newbies put in enough oil, but that causes oil to mist out and perhaps even drip, because the Rohloff isn't a sealed gearbox at all -- it would weigh too much if it were. Experienced owners, who buy both oils in bulk, put in 14ml of all seasons oil after cleaning the box every year or 5000m. The "oil top-up" arises from the knowledge that some oil sticks to the gears even after the cleaning oil/old oil mix is drained, plus whatever fresh all-seasons oil you put in, a basically unknowable amount if you insist on precision. There's a thread on the "slippery math" of Rohloff oil changes here that might amuse you:
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=11786.0
And here, after ten years of Rohloff ownership, is my conclusion on "Power-servicing your Rohloff":
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=13327.0

Andre Jute
2+2 equals ? That depends on whether you are British, French, German or Italian.

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 4:52:30 PM UTC+1, Steve Weeks wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 10:27:47 AM UTC-5, Andre Jute wrote:

I've never been paid by the word, but Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick were...

LoL! Don't forget L. Ron Hubbard, who is reported to have said:
"Writing (science fiction) for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion."
:-

Considering how many billions in real estate the Scientologists now own, built up with L. Ron's science fiction as the origin text of their faith, I'd say he earned plenty per word!

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 4:38:11 PM UTC+1, Steve Weeks wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 9:10:03 AM UTC-5, Andre Jute wrote:

Steve Weeks says
in some applications the losses are tolerable.

I would say in virtually any everyday situation (possibly excluding racing) with the comparative measurement taken further than x miles from base, there are no losses for the Rohloff HGB compared to a derailleur.

The only questions remaining a

Thanks for that very detailed analysis! I was trying to be *extremely* conservative when I made that statement ^^. I am an admirer of the Rohloff though not an owner. I drooled all over a cut-away model of the speedhub at InterBike a couple years ago.

It's wonderful to own too, as long as you understand that it isn't, and can't be what it is sold to you as, a luxury item. It's like a Rolex watch: every farmer had one when I was a schoolboy, because it is a good watch, but today it's an agricultural item which confuses the exclusivity of an elevated price with luxury. A Rolex isn't actually any better than a Seiko 5 which is in many respects more refined and certainly as good a timekeeper -- all for less than a 100th of the price. A Rohloff is similarly an agricultural implement, intended for mud racing, but once you get past how crude it is when new, it grows on you, and the rougher passages soon wear down to settle into that impressive longevity that attracts sensible people. They'll take my Rohloff away over my dead body.

The closest I've come to the Speedhub is the Alfine-11 on my folding commuter bike which, though it's clearly not the equivalent of the Rohloff, is a pretty impressive unit.

I should probably note that the Shimano hub gearboxes with the 50,000km MTBF I referred to above were the standard 7- and 8-speed; the Premium 8-speed is better, and the Alfine is better still, with, IIRC, "Ultra-level seals and bearings". Despite my admiration for Shimano's ability to make good-quality gear at an affordable price, I trashed two 8-speed Shimanos before 5000km, so the Rohloff is especially meritorious for surviving me, and recently I've fitted a bottom-bracket central motor with hefty torque, directly attached by the chain to the Rohloff's sprocket, and at about 6500km that combo has handily outlived the less expensive Shimanos.

If you're into Shimano hub gearboxes, here's an oddity for you, a limited run gearbox with full-automatic electronic control:
http://coolmainpress.com/BICYCLINGsmover.html

Mine gets an oil change every 700 miles or so and after about 7,000 miles (a mere drop in the bucket, true...) shows no signs of deterioration. My level of performance probably doesn't stress it too much. If I had a Rohloff hub, I'd certainly change the oil on a more regular basis... "Oil is cheaper than metal"!

Couldn't agree more.

BTW, if you're new here, welcome. However, as a hub gearbox aficionado, you won't find much joy here. If you speak German, the German Rohloff and other fora are rich sources (though I was a bit disappointed in the possibly expensive miscomprehensions Rolf gathered from them, but that's the problem with large unmoderated fora, that you have to know at least enough to pick the grain from the chaff). If you want an anglophone Rohloff and other hub gearbox forum, superbly friendly and knowledgeable, in no small part due to the innate good manners of all the members plus intelligent moderation, you can do worse than to join the British Thorn Forum at http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php

Andre Jute
I'm not cheap, I'm poor. I buy the best and look after it religiously because that way the best soon gets to be the cheapest by simply lasting longer.

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 8:27:47 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 3:20:11 PM UTC+1, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 10:10:03 AM UTC-4, Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, July 17, 2019 at 12:57:46 AM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
It is kind of weird that you can do absolutely everything hydraulically that you can do with electronics. Just that it is so damned complicated and expensive that no one wants to do it that way.

Another thing is that you can use gear mechanisms to accomplish these things as well but with mechanical losses though of what amount I couldn't even guess.

Was it Andre or Joerg that was talking about a 14 speed internally geared rear hub. That would truly be interesting to ride and see how much losses it generated versus our normal chain and derailleurs.

I run a Rohloff Speed 14 hub gearbox on my everyday bike (the only one actually in use, the others being in the heated loft, once the servant quarters, three storeys up. The bike is from the German baukast (custom builder) Utopia-velo and is a 1935 crossframe-mixte design in modern times meticulously redeveloped from the ground up around Schwalbe's Big Apple balloons, the Rohloff gearbox (Utopia was the first OEM to fit Rohloff boxes, and basically established what was intended as a pretty agricultural mud-plugging box as a deluxe touring box), and whatever else will aid a customer's comfort and ease of operation, without considerations of cost or what roadies are likely to think. Load capacity is 170kg, and the bike is much proven in circumnavigations. Mine is used for recreational rides, utility rides, as a workhorse for carrying hefty painting gear to where I want to paint, and for light touring.

I've developed the bike to virtually zero-service, zero cleaning, zero attention. My chain, for instance, runs inside as near a fully sealed enclosure as you can imagine, and it is never opened, serviced, oiled, cleaned or even wiped down for its entire life; it runs for its entire life, about three times as far as I used to go on a chain before, on its factory lube. On the Thorn forum there are several essays by me describing the development procedure and the logic for each step. I didn't post those to RBT because I'm long since fed up with the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas.

Turning now to the so-called efficiency "loss" of the Rohloff, you have to be a quarterwit roadie or an ivory tower clown without any real world experience to believe in its occurrence anywhere outside a laboratory, and at that a laboratory with an airlock entry. Any old engineer with a bit of lab experience can design a set of tests to prove derailleurs are the most efficient drive form likely to be cost-efficient on a bike -- in the lab. The derailleur has survived so long for good reasons. The minute you take that Rohloff and that derailleur system out of the lab door, dirt starts accumulating on the derailleur and interfering with its efficiency, but not on the Rohloff, which is totally enclosed and running in an oil bath (which you can further tailor by operating it on the thinner winter oil to really trounce the derailleur in a very shot distance -- I run mine year-round on the all-seasons i.e. summer oil but put in only enough to coat all the gears, so there's nothing sloshing around). Of course someone will now argue that the Rohloff sprocket is as exposed as the derailleur cluster to dirt. But you can cover the Rohloff chain and gear wheelies very efficiently with a Chainglider (the supremacy of which I've also described on the Thorn forum, where with the other members who fitted it on my recommendation we have probably over a 100k miles of experience with it). There are photos on the Thorn forum of the inside of my Chainglider after I ran the chain in it for 4500km on the factory lube, zero extra oil, zero service, first time I opened it with serious intent -- and it is clean, and the chain looks new. As you can see, for a moment's worth of thought, this is a loaded deck against the derailleur, and was from the moment the two transmission systems rolled out of the lab.

We all know how fast the efficiency of a perfectly clean derailleur system falls off once it gets road dust on it. The only thing that is new here is that the efficiency of the Rohloff transmission does not fall at all, especially if the chain, sprocket and chainring are also competently enclosed. The Rohloff maintains its laboratory efficiency for the full 5000km or one year between oil services of the box (note that, Rolf -- your guarantee, which is effectively for your life unless you abuse the gearbox, depends on doing the oil changes on schedule). I would bet money that as little as few miles from home a Rohloff is routinely more efficient than the derailleur system that started clean.

I actually think the other argument, that the Rohloff weighs more than a derailleur system, is more logical, if by relative magnitude too petty to be convincing. The weight difference, if any, is so little that it could amount to a one-foot rise in several miles. So, while the argument on weight is more rational than the one on efficiency, it is not all that relevant, except perhaps in racing.

Steve Weeks says
in some applications the losses are tolerable.

I would say in virtually any everyday situation (possibly excluding racing) with the comparative measurement taken further than x miles from base, there are no losses for the Rohloff HGB compared to a derailleur.

The only questions remaining a

a) For any particular Rohloff owner's regularly ridden roads, at how many miles from base does the efficiency of an optimal derailleur system fall to that of the Rohloff? We know the mechanical efficiency differential is pretty small but I think it would be better grasped as a road distance. Call this distance x.

b) At which fraction or multiple of x beyond the first x does the efficiency of a derailleur system fall below the constant efficiency of the Rohloff by the same amount as the derailleur was superior in the laboratory? Call this likely imperceptible but measurable differential d1.

c) At what distance from base, expressed as multiples of d1, will the average cyclist notice that the derailleur system is less efficient than the Rohloff? Call this multiple d2.

My opinion, having used both systems, is that x, the distance of two perfectly tuned systems to equal efficiency, on my all-tarmac but rurally dusty lanes, could be 5-10 miles. Guesstimating (tm Jeff Liebermann), d1 might be the same.

Since in everyday use, starting on perfectly laboratory-grade clean derailleurs and Rohloff transmissions reveals no practical difference in efficiency to openminded riders, d2 seems to me likely to be quite a distance, at least under my relatively clean conditions, say several or many day rides, Perhaps even a couple of thousand miles: some of my riding companions never clean their bikes (they buy near-new aspirational bikes for fifty bucks out of the garages of onetime would-be bicyclists and ride them into the ground, then buy a new one) and their bikes definitely feel stiff to pedal.

Andre Jute
A little, a very little thought will suffice -- Maynard Keynes

PS: Y'all understand that a Rohloff is a handbuilt, handfitted gearbox, don't you? A Shimano machine-huilt HGB starts amazingly smooth and wears out from there; the MTBF is about 50,000km, at which point you throw it away because it isn't worth rebuilding. A Rohloff gearbox is run in, and then slowly reaches a plateau of service the extent of which no one knows, though we can guess by the experience of permanent tourers (to make Tom's point) that it is in excess of 250,000km, I repeat, nobody knows how far in excess. It takes somewhere between 3000 and 8000km (in my opinion) to run in a Rohloff, so for the discussion above we have to assume the box being tested is run in. Chalo once said something to the effect that a Rohloff gearbox is run in about the time a Shimano gearbox dies, so he might have a different view on how long a Rohloff box runs in; I bow to superior experience. I mention it though because we can't set the period of run-in of the Rohloff box longer than the entire service life of the competing derailleur system -- we'd be laughed out of the Double-Blind Testers' Club.

Apparently, Jute still gets paid by the word. Pity.

- Frank Krygowski

Apparently poor Franki-boy is reacting to this from me:

On the Thorn forum there are several essays by me describing the development procedure and the logic for each step. I didn't post those to RBT because I'm long since fed up with the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas.

Yo, Franki-boy, you just self-identified as a one of "the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas". When can we expect you to self-identify as a woman demanding an abortion?

And here I thought that Franki-boy, to preserve his dignity, which is all he has, claims not to read my posts.

Andre Jute
I've never been paid by the word, but Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick we you're sneering at great American writers, Franki-boy.

The Rohloff sounds pretty amazing but it is also $1,600. It does seem to me that recumbents would really benefit with a drive shaft to the rear where it could certainly make a good connection through a chain drive to the Rohloff.

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 9:53:03 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 8:27:47 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 3:20:11 PM UTC+1, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 10:10:03 AM UTC-4, Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, July 17, 2019 at 12:57:46 AM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
It is kind of weird that you can do absolutely everything hydraulically that you can do with electronics. Just that it is so damned complicated and expensive that no one wants to do it that way.

Another thing is that you can use gear mechanisms to accomplish these things as well but with mechanical losses though of what amount I couldn't even guess.

Was it Andre or Joerg that was talking about a 14 speed internally geared rear hub. That would truly be interesting to ride and see how much losses it generated versus our normal chain and derailleurs.

I run a Rohloff Speed 14 hub gearbox on my everyday bike (the only one actually in use, the others being in the heated loft, once the servant quarters, three storeys up. The bike is from the German baukast (custom builder) Utopia-velo and is a 1935 crossframe-mixte design in modern times meticulously redeveloped from the ground up around Schwalbe's Big Apple balloons, the Rohloff gearbox (Utopia was the first OEM to fit Rohloff boxes, and basically established what was intended as a pretty agricultural mud-plugging box as a deluxe touring box), and whatever else will aid a customer's comfort and ease of operation, without considerations of cost or what roadies are likely to think. Load capacity is 170kg, and the bike is much proven in circumnavigations. Mine is used for recreational rides, utility rides, as a workhorse for carrying hefty painting gear to where I want to paint, and for light touring.

I've developed the bike to virtually zero-service, zero cleaning, zero attention. My chain, for instance, runs inside as near a fully sealed enclosure as you can imagine, and it is never opened, serviced, oiled, cleaned or even wiped down for its entire life; it runs for its entire life, about three times as far as I used to go on a chain before, on its factory lube. On the Thorn forum there are several essays by me describing the development procedure and the logic for each step. I didn't post those to RBT because I'm long since fed up with the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas.

Turning now to the so-called efficiency "loss" of the Rohloff, you have to be a quarterwit roadie or an ivory tower clown without any real world experience to believe in its occurrence anywhere outside a laboratory, and at that a laboratory with an airlock entry. Any old engineer with a bit of lab experience can design a set of tests to prove derailleurs are the most efficient drive form likely to be cost-efficient on a bike -- in the lab.. The derailleur has survived so long for good reasons. The minute you take that Rohloff and that derailleur system out of the lab door, dirt starts accumulating on the derailleur and interfering with its efficiency, but not on the Rohloff, which is totally enclosed and running in an oil bath (which you can further tailor by operating it on the thinner winter oil to really trounce the derailleur in a very shot distance -- I run mine year-round on the all-seasons i.e. summer oil but put in only enough to coat all the gears, so there's nothing sloshing around). Of course someone will now argue that the Rohloff sprocket is as exposed as the derailleur cluster to dirt. But you can cover the Rohloff chain and gear wheelies very efficiently with a Chainglider (the supremacy of which I've also described on the Thorn forum, where with the other members who fitted it on my recommendation we have probably over a 100k miles of experience with it). There are photos on the Thorn forum of the inside of my Chainglider after I ran the chain in it for 4500km on the factory lube, zero extra oil, zero service, first time I opened it with serious intent -- and it is clean, and the chain looks new. As you can see, for a moment's worth of thought, this is a loaded deck against the derailleur, and was from the moment the two transmission systems rolled out of the lab.

We all know how fast the efficiency of a perfectly clean derailleur system falls off once it gets road dust on it. The only thing that is new here is that the efficiency of the Rohloff transmission does not fall at all, especially if the chain, sprocket and chainring are also competently enclosed. The Rohloff maintains its laboratory efficiency for the full 5000km or one year between oil services of the box (note that, Rolf -- your guarantee, which is effectively for your life unless you abuse the gearbox, depends on doing the oil changes on schedule). I would bet money that as little as few miles from home a Rohloff is routinely more efficient than the derailleur system that started clean.

I actually think the other argument, that the Rohloff weighs more than a derailleur system, is more logical, if by relative magnitude too petty to be convincing. The weight difference, if any, is so little that it could amount to a one-foot rise in several miles. So, while the argument on weight is more rational than the one on efficiency, it is not all that relevant, except perhaps in racing.

Steve Weeks says
in some applications the losses are tolerable.

I would say in virtually any everyday situation (possibly excluding racing) with the comparative measurement taken further than x miles from base, there are no losses for the Rohloff HGB compared to a derailleur.

The only questions remaining a

a) For any particular Rohloff owner's regularly ridden roads, at how many miles from base does the efficiency of an optimal derailleur system fall to that of the Rohloff? We know the mechanical efficiency differential is pretty small but I think it would be better grasped as a road distance. Call this distance x.

b) At which fraction or multiple of x beyond the first x does the efficiency of a derailleur system fall below the constant efficiency of the Rohloff by the same amount as the derailleur was superior in the laboratory? Call this likely imperceptible but measurable differential d1.

c) At what distance from base, expressed as multiples of d1, will the average cyclist notice that the derailleur system is less efficient than the Rohloff? Call this multiple d2.

My opinion, having used both systems, is that x, the distance of two perfectly tuned systems to equal efficiency, on my all-tarmac but rurally dusty lanes, could be 5-10 miles. Guesstimating (tm Jeff Liebermann), d1 might be the same.

Since in everyday use, starting on perfectly laboratory-grade clean derailleurs and Rohloff transmissions reveals no practical difference in efficiency to openminded riders, d2 seems to me likely to be quite a distance, at least under my relatively clean conditions, say several or many day rides, Perhaps even a couple of thousand miles: some of my riding companions never clean their bikes (they buy near-new aspirational bikes for fifty bucks out of the garages of onetime would-be bicyclists and ride them into the ground, then buy a new one) and their bikes definitely feel stiff to pedal.

Andre Jute
A little, a very little thought will suffice -- Maynard Keynes

PS: Y'all understand that a Rohloff is a handbuilt, handfitted gearbox, don't you? A Shimano machine-huilt HGB starts amazingly smooth and wears out from there; the MTBF is about 50,000km, at which point you throw it away because it isn't worth rebuilding. A Rohloff gearbox is run in, and then slowly reaches a plateau of service the extent of which no one knows, though we can guess by the experience of permanent tourers (to make Tom's point) that it is in excess of 250,000km, I repeat, nobody knows how far in excess. It takes somewhere between 3000 and 8000km (in my opinion) to run in a Rohloff, so for the discussion above we have to assume the box being tested is run in. Chalo once said something to the effect that a Rohloff gearbox is run in about the time a Shimano gearbox dies, so he might have a different view on how long a Rohloff box runs in; I bow to superior experience. I mention it though because we can't set the period of run-in of the Rohloff box longer than the entire service life of the competing derailleur system -- we'd be laughed out of the Double-Blind Testers' Club.

Apparently, Jute still gets paid by the word. Pity.

- Frank Krygowski

Apparently poor Franki-boy is reacting to this from me:

On the Thorn forum there are several essays by me describing the development procedure and the logic for each step. I didn't post those to RBT because I'm long since fed up with the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas.

Yo, Franki-boy, you just self-identified as a one of "the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas". When can we expect you to self-identify as a woman demanding an abortion?

And here I thought that Franki-boy, to preserve his dignity, which is all he has, claims not to read my posts.

Andre Jute
I've never been paid by the word, but Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick we you're sneering at great American writers, Franki-boy.

The Rohloff sounds pretty amazing but it is also $1,600.

You pay for permanent quality, but actually less than you think. It doesn't take many top gruppos that last a finite distance before you've covered the price of a Rohloff with its practically infinite lifespan, and from there on in it's all a freebie. What does a top Shimano cost? How long does it last? How many could you buy for the price of a Rohloff?

It does seem to me that recumbents would really benefit with a drive shaft to the rear where it could certainly make a good connection through a chain drive to the Rohloff.

I've never had a full recumbent (we could ask Rolf, who has a recumbent), though I had a semi-recumbent briefly (I sold it when a guy on the street, seeing one for the first time, offered me more for it than I paid) and was glad to return to my upright touring bikes, which put my head above a Range Rover's roof, so that I seem more threatening to SUV drivers than they do to me. But I once planned to buy a Scooterbike, especially when it turned into Utopia's well-developed Phoenix*, and I studied all the questions associated with such a design closely. One point I remember well is that the extra-long chain run is no problem, because the Rohloff anyway requires a pretty slack chain.

Andre Jute
The long view

*In the end I didn't, for two reasons: One was aesthetic, that the Phoenix was welded, and I would hurt any time I caught glimpse of a weld. The other was the 20in wheels: I ride in small lanes, blacktopped, true, but full of treacherous potholes, which really require a 622mm rim -- and I'd go up to a bigger rim, if I could get tyres to match the Schwalbe Big Apples my bike was designed for.

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 1:34:31 PM UTC-5, Andre Jute wrote:

If you're into Shimano hub gearboxes, here's an oddity for you, a limited run gearbox with full-automatic electronic control:
http://coolmainpress.com/BICYCLINGsmover.html

Thanks for that link. That's an interesting piece of bicycle technology. It's been several years since I did a "monograph" about servicing a supposedly un-serviceable dynohub: https://hubstripping.wordpress.com/2...le-dynamo-hub/


BTW, if you're new here, welcome. However, as a hub gearbox aficionado, you won't find much joy here. If you speak German, the German Rohloff and other fora are rich sources (though I was a bit disappointed in the possibly expensive miscomprehensions Rolf gathered from them, but that's the problem with large unmoderated fora, that you have to know at least enough to pick the grain from the chaff). If you want an anglophone Rohloff and other hub gearbox forum, superbly friendly and knowledgeable, in no small part due to the innate good manners of all the members plus intelligent moderation, you can do worse than to join the British Thorn Forum at http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php

Thanks as well for that link. I can find a lot of stuff to interest me there!
I'm not "new" here, but perhaps more of a lurker, and I try not to comment unless I actually know something relevant. LoL!

Andre Jute
I'm not cheap, I'm poor. I buy the best and look after it religiously because that way the best soon gets to be the cheapest by simply lasting longer.

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:38:28 AM UTC+1, Steve Weeks wrote:
It's been several years since I did a "monograph" about servicing a supposedly un-serviceable dynohub: https://hubstripping.wordpress.com/2...le-dynamo-hub/

That's a super Neddy article. Neddy is an all-purpose technical innocent who requires explicit step by step instructions... I love articles like that because they save me the bother -- and the expense when I get it wrong -- of working the steps out myself.

Andre Jute
I don't know everything. i don't have to. I know the man who knows.

On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 3:29:54 PM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 9:53:03 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 8:27:47 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 3:20:11 PM UTC+1, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Thursday, July 18, 2019 at 10:10:03 AM UTC-4, Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, July 17, 2019 at 12:57:46 AM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
It is kind of weird that you can do absolutely everything hydraulically that you can do with electronics. Just that it is so damned complicated and expensive that no one wants to do it that way.

Another thing is that you can use gear mechanisms to accomplish these things as well but with mechanical losses though of what amount I couldn't even guess.

Was it Andre or Joerg that was talking about a 14 speed internally geared rear hub. That would truly be interesting to ride and see how much losses it generated versus our normal chain and derailleurs.

I run a Rohloff Speed 14 hub gearbox on my everyday bike (the only one actually in use, the others being in the heated loft, once the servant quarters, three storeys up. The bike is from the German baukast (custom builder) Utopia-velo and is a 1935 crossframe-mixte design in modern times meticulously redeveloped from the ground up around Schwalbe's Big Apple balloons, the Rohloff gearbox (Utopia was the first OEM to fit Rohloff boxes, and basically established what was intended as a pretty agricultural mud-plugging box as a deluxe touring box), and whatever else will aid a customer's comfort and ease of operation, without considerations of cost or what roadies are likely to think. Load capacity is 170kg, and the bike is much proven in circumnavigations. Mine is used for recreational rides, utility rides, as a workhorse for carrying hefty painting gear to where I want to paint, and for light touring.

I've developed the bike to virtually zero-service, zero cleaning, zero attention. My chain, for instance, runs inside as near a fully sealed enclosure as you can imagine, and it is never opened, serviced, oiled, cleaned or even wiped down for its entire life; it runs for its entire life, about three times as far as I used to go on a chain before, on its factory lube. On the Thorn forum there are several essays by me describing the development procedure and the logic for each step. I didn't post those to RBT because I'm long since fed up with the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas.

Turning now to the so-called efficiency "loss" of the Rohloff, you have to be a quarterwit roadie or an ivory tower clown without any real world experience to believe in its occurrence anywhere outside a laboratory, and at that a laboratory with an airlock entry. Any old engineer with a bit of lab experience can design a set of tests to prove derailleurs are the most efficient drive form likely to be cost-efficient on a bike -- in the lab. The derailleur has survived so long for good reasons. The minute you take that Rohloff and that derailleur system out of the lab door, dirt starts accumulating on the derailleur and interfering with its efficiency, but not on the Rohloff, which is totally enclosed and running in an oil bath (which you can further tailor by operating it on the thinner winter oil to really trounce the derailleur in a very shot distance -- I run mine year-round on the all-seasons i.e. summer oil but put in only enough to coat all the gears, so there's nothing sloshing around). Of course someone will now argue that the Rohloff sprocket is as exposed as the derailleur cluster to dirt. But you can cover the Rohloff chain and gear wheelies very efficiently with a Chainglider (the supremacy of which I've also described on the Thorn forum, where with the other members who fitted it on my recommendation we have probably over a 100k miles of experience with it). There are photos on the Thorn forum of the inside of my Chainglider after I ran the chain in it for 4500km on the factory lube, zero extra oil, zero service, first time I opened it with serious intent -- and it is clean, and the chain looks new. As you can see, for a moment's worth of thought, this is a loaded deck against the derailleur, and was from the moment the two transmission systems rolled out of the lab.

We all know how fast the efficiency of a perfectly clean derailleur system falls off once it gets road dust on it. The only thing that is new here is that the efficiency of the Rohloff transmission does not fall at all, especially if the chain, sprocket and chainring are also competently enclosed. The Rohloff maintains its laboratory efficiency for the full 5000km or one year between oil services of the box (note that, Rolf -- your guarantee, which is effectively for your life unless you abuse the gearbox, depends on doing the oil changes on schedule). I would bet money that as little as few miles from home a Rohloff is routinely more efficient than the derailleur system that started clean.

I actually think the other argument, that the Rohloff weighs more than a derailleur system, is more logical, if by relative magnitude too petty to be convincing. The weight difference, if any, is so little that it could amount to a one-foot rise in several miles. So, while the argument on weight is more rational than the one on efficiency, it is not all that relevant, except perhaps in racing.

Steve Weeks says
in some applications the losses are tolerable.

I would say in virtually any everyday situation (possibly excluding racing) with the comparative measurement taken further than x miles from base, there are no losses for the Rohloff HGB compared to a derailleur.

The only questions remaining a

a) For any particular Rohloff owner's regularly ridden roads, at how many miles from base does the efficiency of an optimal derailleur system fall to that of the Rohloff? We know the mechanical efficiency differential is pretty small but I think it would be better grasped as a road distance. Call this distance x.

b) At which fraction or multiple of x beyond the first x does the efficiency of a derailleur system fall below the constant efficiency of the Rohloff by the same amount as the derailleur was superior in the laboratory? Call this likely imperceptible but measurable differential d1.

c) At what distance from base, expressed as multiples of d1, will the average cyclist notice that the derailleur system is less efficient than the Rohloff? Call this multiple d2.

My opinion, having used both systems, is that x, the distance of two perfectly tuned systems to equal efficiency, on my all-tarmac but rurally dusty lanes, could be 5-10 miles. Guesstimating (tm Jeff Liebermann), d1 might be the same.

Since in everyday use, starting on perfectly laboratory-grade clean derailleurs and Rohloff transmissions reveals no practical difference in efficiency to openminded riders, d2 seems to me likely to be quite a distance, at least under my relatively clean conditions, say several or many day rides, Perhaps even a couple of thousand miles: some of my riding companions never clean their bikes (they buy near-new aspirational bikes for fifty bucks out of the garages of onetime would-be bicyclists and ride them into the ground, then buy a new one) and their bikes definitely feel stiff to pedal.

Andre Jute
A little, a very little thought will suffice -- Maynard Keynes

PS: Y'all understand that a Rohloff is a handbuilt, handfitted gearbox, don't you? A Shimano machine-huilt HGB starts amazingly smooth and wears out from there; the MTBF is about 50,000km, at which point you throw it away because it isn't worth rebuilding. A Rohloff gearbox is run in, and then slowly reaches a plateau of service the extent of which no one knows, though we can guess by the experience of permanent tourers (to make Tom's point) that it is in excess of 250,000km, I repeat, nobody knows how far in excess. It takes somewhere between 3000 and 8000km (in my opinion) to run in a Rohloff, so for the discussion above we have to assume the box being tested is run in. Chalo once said something to the effect that a Rohloff gearbox is run in about the time a Shimano gearbox dies, so he might have a different view on how long a Rohloff box runs in; I bow to superior experience.. I mention it though because we can't set the period of run-in of the Rohloff box longer than the entire service life of the competing derailleur system -- we'd be laughed out of the Double-Blind Testers' Club.

Apparently, Jute still gets paid by the word. Pity.

- Frank Krygowski

Apparently poor Franki-boy is reacting to this from me:

On the Thorn forum there are several essays by me describing the development procedure and the logic for each step. I didn't post those to RBT because I'm long since fed up with the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas.

Yo, Franki-boy, you just self-identified as a one of "the tiresome clowns here wrecking every working thread in pursuit of their dumb vendettas".. When can we expect you to self-identify as a woman demanding an abortion?

And here I thought that Franki-boy, to preserve his dignity, which is all he has, claims not to read my posts.

Andre Jute
I've never been paid by the word, but Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick we you're sneering at great American writers, Franki-boy.

The Rohloff sounds pretty amazing but it is also $1,600.

You pay for permanent quality, but actually less than you think. It doesn't take many top gruppos that last a finite distance before you've covered the price of a Rohloff with its practically infinite lifespan, and from there on in it's all a freebie. What does a top Shimano cost? How long does it last? How many could you buy for the price of a Rohloff?

It does seem to me that recumbents would really benefit with a drive shaft to the rear where it could certainly make a good connection through a chain drive to the Rohloff.

I've never had a full recumbent (we could ask Rolf, who has a recumbent), though I had a semi-recumbent briefly (I sold it when a guy on the street, seeing one for the first time, offered me more for it than I paid) and was glad to return to my upright touring bikes, which put my head above a Range Rover's roof, so that I seem more threatening to SUV drivers than they do to me. But I once planned to buy a Scooterbike, especially when it turned into Utopia's well-developed Phoenix*, and I studied all the questions associated with such a design closely. One point I remember well is that the extra-long chain run is no problem, because the Rohloff anyway requires a pretty slack chain.

Andre Jute
The long view

*In the end I didn't, for two reasons: One was aesthetic, that the Phoenix was welded, and I would hurt any time I caught glimpse of a weld. The other was the 20in wheels: I ride in small lanes, blacktopped, true, but full of treacherous potholes, which really require a 622mm rim -- and I'd go up to a bigger rim, if I could get tyres to match the Schwalbe Big Apples my bike was designed for.

Occasionally it passes through my head to build a streamliner and take it to the Salt Flats. That is the only way that I'd ever ride a recumbent.

Tom, I also meant to say that absolutely the best brakes I know are Magura's rim hydraulics; they have all the stopping power you need (basically they're a 622mm disc brake), they are tuneable with many freely available block compounds (if no longer by two chamber sizes as between the HS33 and the HS11 in days of yore -- both now have the same volume of fluid and thus the same pressure), they're sealed for life, totally service free, and, above all, you can set them up to be superbly progressive.

Andre Jute
Serendipity is great but control is better

On Wednesday, July 17, 2019 at 12:57:46 AM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
It is kind of weird that you can do absolutely everything hydraulically that you can do with electronics. Just that it is so damned complicated and expensive that no one wants to do it that way.

Another thing is that you can use gear mechanisms to accomplish these things as well but with mechanical losses though of what amount I couldn't even guess.

Was it Andre or Joerg that was talking about a 14 speed internally geared rear hub. That would truly be interesting to ride and see how much losses it generated versus our normal chain and derailleurs.