Originally Posted by machinestatic

I know you've already received 5 pages of opinions and I have less than 10 posts, but fffffuuuuuuu, here we go anyway.

From my personal experience, I bought a bike with a Sturmey Archer internal 5 speed hub (a Torker Graduate) and just a few weeks later, I went and dropped money on a single speed bike to ride instead. (Of course, this is just my experience but...) I HATED the Sturmey. It would slip into neutral in between gears, and the pedals would spin freely without catching. It would down shift 2 gears below what I was riding at, all by itself, while I was riding next to speeding cars. It would make all sorts of terrifying clunking noises in the middle of Boston intersections.

And this is after I had mechanics at two different shops fine tune the fussy indicator chain to exactly where they felt was the right spot. It's a great product when it's adjusted EXACTLY perfectly, but I don't have the patience to tune a microscopic nut for a half hour every day.

However, since then I've had a friend show me how easy it is to adjust a Shimano hub by just matching up two yellow lines in a matter of 5 seconds. Curse you Sturmey Archer!