Greetings,

I'm building a new bike that takes it's inspiration from the old English 3 speeds but with modern components--anything from the last 20 years. The frame is a 1984-ish lugged Schwinn MTB. I want a relatively modern internally geared hub. The only problem is that the shifter mechanisms for anything above a 5 speed seem to be bulky and generally awful looking. I also don't care for grip shifters or bar-end knobs. Aesthetics are a consideration and my biggest obstacle. I'm also trying to avoid plastic components.

My question to all Shimano, SRAM, S/A users is have any of you taken a modern internally geared hub (5+ speeds) and put an older style friction or index shifter on it? The obvious problems I foresee are not enough cable travel and/or the indexes not lining up.

This is what I had in mind to try.


I know this was possible with the old Sturmey Archer AW's. I believe Sheldon attached a Shimano bar end shifter to one.

Could this work and why can't it?

I don't know if you've ridden an internal hub before, but finding the gears without the indexing built into the shifter is pretty tough. It's tough on an AW, I'm guessing it's REALLY tough on a hub with more gears. Even Sheldon said it was hard to find two with his barcon-operated AW. I can attest that on my AW-equipped mtb frame, if the cable goes out of adjustment, I'm screwed as to shifting without fixing it.

So, I suspect you can use a friction shifter, but I don't think it will be fun.

Jtek is working on an adapter for nexus 8 speed hubs so you can use barend shifters. Combine those with some Paul Thumbies and you would be close. Or mount the barends on the downtube.

Friction shifters will not work with modern, more than 3 speed hubs.

https://jtekengineering.com/index.html

Edit: add link

https://www.bikeforums.net/general-cycling-discussion/392104-internal-gears-dropped-bar-bikes.html

For ines, you'd pretty much have to measure cable pull of the various x-10 speed shifters and see if one matched up with the cable pull that the internal hub needed. It would have to be quite precise since you want the number of the gear you are in to be an integer!
Possibly one of these could be adapted to change the "ratio"?
https://jtekengineering.com/shiftmate.htm

Something else to check is that the cable pull for each gear of the internal hub is the same for every gear. I'm not into internal hubs, so I have no clue about that.

I seem to remember reading that the Rohloff has the indexing done within the hub?
On the other hand, it uses 2 cables?

Here's more proof that it will work. I'm going to do it!

https://www.oldspokeshome.com/blog/?p=119

Slick! That`s a killer Caserole! I was going to say that there was a guy (rad-something, I think he posts on the VRC forum here too) on rbr running a Nexus 8 with DT shifters but I couln`t fine his post again. I don`t think he used the Travel Agent.

Glad to meet you. I've posted a couple of links in BF to your casseroll. Cool bike. How about a close up shot of travel agent on the bike. Do you sell on ebay? That wall and walkway with bikes in the background looks familiar.

It's a pleasure! I'll edit my post to avoid any confusion.

You had me going. For a little while I thought Oldspokes had joined us. I went over to C&V and saw your thread over there and figured out what happened.

Ah, the internet! Understand what I meant, not what I said. :-)