Originally Posted by
jolly_ross
This depends on the frequency and stress-level of the use. The lovely old single speed commuters pictured earlier would be very little trouble at all when bimbling around city streets.
My winter mountain bike is out every week - does a lot of high stress hauling through clay and mud. After one upsetting failure of an XTR (!) rear derailleur I bought a purpose built winter bike. I thought the IGH and 1/8" chain and single drive cog *must* me more reliable and less friggery than a derailleur.
Surprisingly this is wrong - the bike has horizontal dropouts so it's not easy to find a sprung chain tensioner - so the chain requires a lot of tinkering. (It doesn't get it - I largely ignore it and replace it and sprocket every now and then.)
The Shimano sanctioned grease lube process for the IGH is v involved - so I'm switching to oil dipping, this is a wheel-off-hub-out messaround every 6 months.
Maybe a low level derailleur system would have been better. Perhaps a 1x9 or the like.
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My most reliable bike has been our Tandem - which only sees dry weather road use and has a Rohloff hub.
jolly_ross, can you explain the issue with the horizontal dropouts and the chain tensioner? If you have horizontal drops you shouldn't need a tensioner, unless you meant to say vertical dropouts. As far as chain tensioners go, they are readily available and can be found for not too much coin. I have seen folks take old derailleurs and use them as tensioners when they didn't have a purpose built one available.