Originally Posted by
phughes
...
What is your gearing setup on the Rohloff and how does the low and high range compare to your derailleur bikes?
EDIT: Never mind, I just read your linked thread, and saw your gearing choice for the Rohloff, but there was not a direct comparison between it and your other bikes.
My Rohloff bike gearing for touring with a 36T chainring, 16T sprocket, 14 evenly spaced gears from 16.2 to 85.1 gear inches. That is with a 57mm wide 26 inch tire.
I use a 44T chainring when riding the unladen Rohloff bike around home, that has higher gearing but with an unladen bike, or maybe only a pannier of groceries I do not need the really low gears I use for touring. That gear range is from 19.8 to 104.0 gear inches. Since I use different chainrings on my Rohloff bike to raise or lower my gearing range, a belt would be rather impractical for me. It is easy to add or remove four links from the chain, I decided on chain drive before I ordered the frame as I planned to run different chainrings.
My two derailleur touring bikes both have the same drive train, a 3X8 half step plus granny system, chainring is 46/42/24, cassette is a Sram 11/32 eight speed which is 11/12/14/16/18/21/26/32. I try to avoid using the two most cross chained gears for each chainring, thus use 18 of the possible 24 gears. One bike is 700c, typically with 37mm tires and the other bike is 26 inch, usually 40 or 50mm tires, 40 for pavement and 50mm for gravel.
The 700c bike has closer spaced gearing above about 50 gear inches, wider spacing below 50 gear inches because of the two larger and single smaller chainrings, ranges from 20.7 to 115.5 gear inches.
The 26 inch bike has slightly lower gearing due to smaller wheel diameter.
These links provide more data on that gearing:
https://gear-calculator.com/?GR=RLSH...N=MPH&DV=teeth
https://gear-calculator.com/?GR=RLSH...N=MPH&DV=teeth
https://gear-calculator.com/?GR=DERS...N=MPH&DV=teeth
So, you can see for touring my Rohloff gives me much lower gearing than the derailleur bikes. But I am more inclined to need lower gearing with that bike as I likely am carrying a heavier load on that bike, it is my expedition bike. I might be carrying over a week of food on the Rohloff bike, but likely have no more than two or three days of food on the derailleur bikes.
This is my Rohloff bike, this is pretty close to the heaviest that I have ever loaded it.
And this is my Lynskey, the 700c derailleur bike, I consider this my light touring bike:
