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Initial Report: Rohloff 500/14 Speedhub
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) Visit Jute on Amps at http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/ "wonderfully well written and reasoned information for the tube audio constructor" John Broskie TubeCAD & GlassWare "an unbelievably comprehensive web site containing vital gems of wisdom" Stuart Perry Hi-Fi News & Record Review |
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