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.
Based on what I've seen of commuting, in the city its mostly IGH bikes. Those people go in all weather, all seasons. I'd say a lot more than 30-40% of bikes are IGH. It might get down to those percentages near the city end of my new long commute (towards Hillerød). Almost everyone who goes a long distance (on that route) has a derailleur bike, but I think that has a lot more to do with fitting in as a "serious biker" than it has to do with any technical need. I think that few if any of those "serious" bikers could stoop so low as to try an IGH and find out if its reliable. I mentioned the Alfine 11 to a guy I am acquainted with, and he only laughed! This after he had just told me how he spent 2500+ DKK fixing his derailleur after he broke a chain and crashed.
Originally Posted by
interested
The first generation of Nexus 8 hubs were so badly designed, that during the first winter of their release, many danish LBS's had entire crates with dead Nexus hubs, total mayhem. To this day the danish bicycle industry are still boycotting the Nexus 8 hub, even though the later models like the Alfine S501 have improved at lot.
I guess that has led to the uniform usage of Nexus 7 on all "big name" brands. How boring. I heard something similar about the iMotion 9 from a senior mechanic down at the Nihola store. Apparently his test model didn't last a single year, and they've kept selling nothing more exciting than 5 and 7 speed SRAM's ever since. (I tell you, iM9 would have been glorious on a trike.)
Originally Posted by
interested
IGH's are also known to gum up in the winter, leading to either slow shifting or no shifting at all. The problem seems to be a combination of water ingress and contamination. The weak return spring also means that frozen cables can lock the shifting quite easily. The danish winters tend to have very high air humidity, be wet, and have frequent freeze-thaw cycles which seems to be a particular nasty combination for many IGH's.
My problem is just a frozen shift cable. I ran my Nexus 7 in 3rd gear for a month or two this winter. Turns out it hardly makes a difference on my commute times. Course a lot of other things got rattled, rusted or broken off the bike these past two winters...