Originally Posted by
interested
Where I live, IGH's are very common; roughly 30-40% of all bikes sold in Denmark have IGH's. They work very well for low mileage, fair weather cyclists. Medium and long distance 4 season commuters, tend to destroy their IGH's at regular intervals.
Interesting. Riders were getting 50.000+ kilometers of good service from their Sturmey-Archer hubs
one-hundred years ago. Heinz Stucke pedaled his Sachs 3-speed over 500.000 kilometers. In 1939 Tommy Godwin rode 120,805 kilometers - a world record for a single year - using a Sturmey four-speed hub.
IGH's tend not to be cost effective to repair, and internal spare parts can be either difficult or impossible to get.
In N.A., neither Shimano nor SRAM provide internal parts support. The official word from Shimano seems to be "replace the hub" and corporate SRAM doesn't seem to be aware they sell IGHs in N.A. Sturmey-Archer is arguably best-in-industry with their extensive factory support of small parts, although internal parts for old+rare models or very new models can be sketchy.