The technicalities of the Rohloff hub have been reported on RBT many
time, so I'll confine myself to few initial impressions. Note that my
bike hasn't yet run even 50 miles, so these are *initial* impressions.
Note further that the Rohloff gearhub is intended to survive the
antics of downhill offroaders while my expectations are of a refined
city-n-country nature.

I had a Rohloff hub on loan from an RBT lurker in Dublin who wrote
offering to lend me a wheel and controls for a few weeks, to whom
anonymous thanks because he asks not to be named. His gearbox has
never been open in several years, except for routine oil changes. It
has enough miles on it to be certain that it has settled in. (He
bought a Cyber Nexus bike on the Continent after he saw my netsite
about my automatic Trek, and took the wheels and the rest of the
groupset over to his previously Rohloff-equipped bike.)

I therefore expected my new Rohloff gearbox to be more noisy than his
and was pleasantly surprised. The SON hub dynamo appears to be louder
than the new Rohloff box. That makes the whole bike noisier than the
Nexus/Shimano dynohub combination but it is all pretty marginal. It's
one of those things you hear only because you're listening for it, and
you're listening for it not because the noise has disturbed you but
only because others have made a song and dance about it. I don't hear
the noise of derailleur-equped bikes ridden by people in my group
unless I listen for them or the riders make an awkward change. You get
used to much, and with the automatic Cyber Nexus you have no reason to
listen because it is irrelevant which gear you are in: the box will
find the right gear without your assistance.

Less pleasing is the agricultural quality of the Rohloff gearchange,
which I expect to be able to adjust a little and then to have to live
with, the reference being the well-used Rohloff box and controls I had
on loan, which after a few thousand miles were still pretty resistant.
Apparently one can send the Rohloff hub away to get a softer spring
fitted to give a smoother gearchange.

The rotary control for the gearchange is beautifully finished but the
entire, sturdy design is a ton less pleasing or ergonomic than
Shimano's Nexus (manual) rotary control (the cheapest Nexus control --
there are trigger shifter alternatives available). For a start, the
Rohloff rotary handle is triangular, so that at one point or another
it will be higher than the edge of the handlebar grip. This
discontinuity will be enough to bruise the pad on your palm below your
forefinger, and the pad below your thumb as well. With short grips
made for hub gearboxes there's nowhere else to rest your fingers
except on Rohloff's rotary control. I shall probably change to
standard length, long grips on both sides to give me somewhere to rest
my hands where they won't be blistered or worse. I wear gloves all the
time, in winter leather dress gloves, but that is not enough
protection. Still, the Rohloff control is well enough finished not to
damage fine gloves immediately.

There is more wrong with the control before one even operates it. The
gear indicators, all fourteen of them, are raised numbers, black on
black rubber, invisible at a glance even in good light. Gears 11 and
7, at least, should be distinguishable at a quick glance. 11 is the
normal everyday gear with 1:1 power transfer, the three gears above it
being overdrives. Changes from 7 to 8 and 8 to 7 require a brief lift
on the pedals or the box might drop you into 14, which could be
dangerous in traffic. This is a known peculiarity of the Rohloff hub
gearbox; one just has to live with it. But it would help to avoid the
problem if one of those two gears was somehow marked. Furthermore,
gear 3 should be marked in my use, because the gears below are
intended only for the hill in front of my house. One doesn't want to
start off in traffic in such a limp gear. I'll probably make dabs of
white luminous paint on the rubber numbers.

The control is stiff; you don't move it with your fingers but with
wrist-twist or even whole arm action. Hardly elegant, hardly a gliding
action.
The whole agricultural outlook of the Rohloff gearchange control makes
the Nexus look like it was built by a Swiss jeweler. I expect the
Rohloff control will settle in a little with wear. I plan to grease it
thoroughly in the first service at 200 miles.

Even the weight of your foot on the pedal at standstill is enough to
create a good deal of resistance against a gearchange, and to cause
the change when it happens to clunk. These clunking noises are in fact
more disturbing than the whirring noise others have written about,
which I do not hear over the SON's noise. If one lifts the foot
between gear changes, the change is clunk-free but still requires more
force than I find agreeable. The run-in Rohloff gearbox I had on loan
had a much-smoother change altogether; I hope I don't have to wait
until the end of the summer before my Rohloff hub gears have enough
miles on them settle in.

One chooses the range of a Rohloff hub and tyre combination by
altering the sprocket/chainwheel ratio. I chose the lightest legal
transfer offered, 38 tooth chainwheel with 16 tooth sprocket, because
this would give me two or three ratios below what I could get with a
Nexus gearbox, in order to tackle the steep hill in front of my house.
Essentially, a Rohloff gearbox is like Shimano's Nexus 8 speed gearbox
with two or three equally spaced gears below the mountainbike-like 26
gear-inch bottom common on Nexus-equipped bikes, an overlap for 9 of
the Rohloff gears (because the Nexus isn't as equally spaced over its
8 gears), and then two or three equally spaced gears above the Nexus
on the Rohloff hub. You can move the Rohloff's 526 per cent range up
and down with the sprocket/crank combo, but with such a wide range
already the range of movement is limited before gears become wasted at
the top by your leg power and at the bottom by your ability to balance
the bike.

However, I might have underrated my own power somewhat. I tend on the
level to use gears 12 or 13 in the Rohloff box, when in fact it would
make sense to arrange the crank/sprocket ratio so that the 1:1 gear,
11th, is the one normally used on the level, leaving three overdrive
gears for assisting gravity on downhill speed runs. This is a worse
midjudgement than the bare facts given suggest, as in freezing weather
I rode out in long underwear; in the summer I'll probably be in 14th
on the flat and looking for something faster.

If you want a fully enclosed chaincase, the choice of crank and
sprocket are not free. Chaincases of the Utopia Country and the Hebie
Chainglider type fit only a very limited choice of sprocket/crank
combinations. Any other full chaincase would be a hassle to fit. I
think I might get away with fitting a 15 tooth sprocket without having
to change the chaincase.

Just as well I didn't get the 38x17 combination I first wanted; though
he had a 17t sprocket in stock, the dealer refused to fit it with a
38t chainwheel on the grounds that Rohloff had declared it "illegal".
Uh-huh.

****

All in all, the Rohloff gearbox is precisely as advertised (Rohloff
even tells you about the rotary control edge not matching the grip
edge -- how's that for customer-awareness?). Out of the box the
Rohloff Speedhub isn't as smooth as a manual Shimano Nexus box, it
isn't -- of course it isn't! -- as unobtrusive as my Cyber Nexus fave,
but I imagine the Rohloff will last forever. It also has the range I
now need, which the Nexus doesn't provide. The Rohloff is much less
noisy than I expected, and the initial change is probably less rough
than trying to learn to change with derailleurs again. In practice, in
less than 50 miles, I'm already in danger of forgetting some of these
first impressions and adapting to the Rohloff's foibles.

I'll report back when my Rohloff has a thousand miles or so on it and
has settled in or I have the hang of adjusting it.

Andre Jute
Did no one tell Herr Rohloff that a little inaccuracy sometimes saves
a thousand miles of waiting. -- with apologies to H.H.Munro ("Saki")
(1870-1916)

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