Originally Posted by
CharlesA
Thanks for all the tips and suggestions, I guess my issues with a derailleur have been pretty standard, maintenance related ones. I guess it accounts to laziness or inattentiveness on my part to be honest.
So basically it sounds as if the pro to the rohloff is low low maintenance but the con being if you break down in the middle of nowhere, you're up **** creek? Where as its pretty easy to replace derailleur parts wherever you may be? Is that the long and short of it? Also how loud is loud?
I use derailleurs quite a bit and have no real complaint with them. The Rohloff is better in some ways and worse in others. I like that I can select any gear I want, any time I want, with a single control. It's easier and more friendly than manipulating double controls and figuring out which chainring and cog will give me the gear I want - but the derailleurs aren't exactly rocket science, either! And I like that I can more-or-less ignore the Rohloff too. It just doesn't need the attention that derailleurs do.
I personally think the worries about the Rohloff breaking down in the middle of nowhere are overblown. It's pretty unlikely - much less likely than with derailleurs, IMO. And frankly, replacing a modern derailleur isn't exactly a piece of cake in lower whereamistan either. And whereas with a derailleur breakdown you may well be stuck in your smallest cog, a failure of a Rohloff cable or box still allows you to manually select an appropriate gear, and manually change that gear when you need to. Only a catastrophic failure of the hub itself would leave you stranded, and I've never actually heard of that happening.
WRT noise, the Rohloff is almost silent in some gears, while others sound like a maladjusted derailleur. Imagine the sound of the chain grinding "in between" cogs: kind of annoying on its own, and almost intolerable if you have metal fenders acting as resonators.