Originally Posted by Chris_W

A couple of people above asked for feedback about running a Rohloff on a tandem, so here goes:

We used a Rohloff on our tandem for a couple of months. We took it off because you can only shift the Rohloff during the dead-spot of the pedaling motion - if there's any power going through the drivetrain then it won't shift, or it will at least be very hard to do so. Since we prefer to have our cranks 90 degrees out of phase, we have no dead spot, and so shifting with the Rohloff was pretty poor - all of the derailleur setups that we've had on the bike have worked better (we've had Shimano, Campy, and SRAM shifters on there and Shimano MTB, Shimano road, and SRAM MTB derailleurs). I've since put the Rohloff hub on a 29er hardtail MTB, and in that application it is awesome. I assume that if you pedal in phase on a tandem then a Rohloff would shift pretty well.

I'm also not a fan of the Rohloff for road riding because the 13.6% shifts are too large. Most 10-speed road cassettes have cog size differences of 8-12%, with some wider-range cassettes having one or two 13-15% jumps. 13.6% is more similar to the jumps made on MTB cassettes, and that is the domain it is targeted at, as well as adventure bike tourers. Instead of having a 500+% gear range, I'd rather that Rohloff made a road version with a gear range of only about 400% but had 11-12% differences between gears. Again, I've found the hub to be ideal on a MTB (especially because derailleurs get so easily knocked out of line or much worse in any technical terrain) but IMO it is not suited to road riding after you're accustomed to 10-speed cassettes.