noglider 

Scheherezade, I agree that that bike is geared insanely high.

One disadvantage of IGH's is that the overall range is narrower than that of derailleur systems. But it's easy to compensate for this. The approach I recommend is to make sure your bottom gear is sufficiently low. This will lower your top gear, but that's a lot less important: you could learn to pedal faster, which is a useful skill. And we're talking about going downhill, where you probably have no real need to go faster than you can already go. I usually coast down hills. Sometimes I pedal downhill, and yes, that's fun, but it's not necessary.

tcs, I misunderstood Aaron, which led to my non-sensical response. Some will think that the small chainring looks "too small", and that IS an aesthetic consideration. Functionally, it's fine. It looks "wrong" only because of what we're used to.

fietsbob

Ah, that is where Rohloff comes in to be a popular choice for long distance Touring ,
and European Mountain Bike endurance racers.

low like a 34/22, high like a 42/11 .

I got a large range , by essentially the same path on my Brompton 3 speed..

there is a range shift with a Schlumpf Swiss Mountain Drive, an iG 2 speed Crankset.

15t on hub, 54t chainring, and a 2.5:1 reduction gear ,
the lowest gear in the hub is followed by the highest hub gear
in low range on the crank ,
It's like a 21.6t cog.

*** Rohloff designed a 7 speed hub (like 3, narrow medium and wide, 3speeds)
and the extra double reduction gear as a unit,

8th is low in high range, 7th is high in low range .. 13.6% change between gears ..

Oil wetted, all ball and needle bearings in there..

wrk101

Compared to replacing a worn derailleur which is the case of the OP (see other thread). Just about any long cage Shimano RD will work on that bike, and function well with the triple up front.

Now if you are starting from scratch, the cost would be very competitive. But when you are converting an existing bike, that already has the rest of the parts in place, its a costly alternative. A new Shimano Deore RD can be had for about $25. Better models like a Deore LX can be found for about $35. A used RD would be less of course.

As far as gear capacity, go to the Sheldon Brown site, and run the gear calculator there. It is not uncommon for a triple touring bike like yours to have a 400% to 500% gearing range, or higher depending on chain ring sizes and rear freewheel.

interested

Where I live, IGH's are very common; roughly 30-40% of all bikes sold in Denmark have IGH's. They work very well for low mileage, fair weather cyclists. Medium and long distance 4 season commuters, tend to destroy their IGH's at regular intervals. Shimano Nexus IGH's are probably the most common IGH on the market because it is "cheap" and have Shimano support. Many Nexus hubs have several design flaws; if you pit the races, the entire wheel is a write-off, very strong riders can torque them to death, the maintenance procedure is so hideously complex that it isn't cost effective to do. Shimano have later added an oil-bath procedure that is much simpler to follow, but since the hubs were designed for grease lubrication, one has to service the hub much more frequently (around 2500-3000 km) when converting it to oil.

The first generation of Nexus 8 hubs were so badly designed, that during the first winter of their release, many danish LBS's had entire crates with dead Nexus hubs, total mayhem. To this day the danish bicycle industry are still boycotting the Nexus 8 hub, even though the later models like the Alfine S501 have improved at lot.

IGH's are also known to gum up in the winter, leading to either slow shifting or no shifting at all. The problem seems to be a combination of water ingress and contamination. The weak return spring also means that frozen cables can lock the shifting quite easily. The danish winters tend to have very high air humidity, be wet, and have frequent freeze-thaw cycles which seems to be a particular nasty combination for many IGH's.

IGH's tend not to be cost effective to repair, and internal spare parts can be either difficult or impossible to get. 7-8 speed IGH's can be quite labor intensive to work with (and they require special knowledge), so usually they are just replaced with a working unit. A major reason for people wrecking their IGH's are because they don't service them at proper intervals; they just ride them until they break apart.

I am not trying to paint a doom-and-gloom picture of IGH's. They do work well for many people and they do have their advantages too. But they are mechanical devices that sometimes fail, and some people have problems with them because of certain climate and riding patterns, and because some IGH's have design problems.

--
Regards

AaronAnderson

I really appreciate the outlook from someone on the other side of the world. Always amazed at how cool the internet can be sometimes! For my use case, I think it's just going to be a 3 speed Sturmey Archer on a fair weather bike, so all should be good and fun

noglider 

Aaron, what kind of terrain will you ride on? One thing I've learned is that with a 3-speed, with its very wide steps between gears, I have to go at the speed the bike tells me to use. I can't tell the bike any more. When I shift down, I have to slow way down. I have to relax. The bike discourages hard riding. So I've learned to ride gently, for the most part.

Scheherezade 

Thanks, I'm familiar with Sheldon's calculator. I was just wondering if certain combinations are better for wear than others. Large cog and large chainring? Small cog and small chainring? Is 1/8" stuff more durable than 3/32"? I'm just not familiar with singlespeed wisdom.

fietsbob

I like QBP's Surly Stainless steel single speed chainrings, they're Flat, made up to 50t in 110 and 130 bcd.
And, like the 15,16,17 t. Rohloff cogs on their hub, can be flipped over and double the wear ..

aluminum 7075 is a long wearing Al alloy.. .

there is a bit more surface to a 4/32 [1/8''] than 3/32 .. tooth,

and as the 1/8" chain still has the pins long enough to sit proud over the link
the likelihood of pulling out is less ..
On My Brompton and rohloff trekking bike,
I got a proper 3/32 single speed chain a NOS , it seems to wear longer ,
not want to come off , like a derailleur chain trekking bike came with the Original Rohloff also, chain, stretched and came off on its own .

full bushing is a longer wearing design than the newer bushing-less,
flush rivet, derailleur chain

sleeve tube inside inner link , versus raising an edge in making the hole.
and having the roller edges riding on that edge made around the hole in the inner plate..

noglider 

1/8" is a lot more durable than 3/32". Also, as I said before, derailleurs change chainline, adding wear to the chain.

Large cogs and large chainrings (with high tooth counts) are better for wear because it spreads the tension over more teeth. Unfortunately, the fashion is going in the other direction. How could I possibly even use an 11-tooth cog?

AaronAnderson

This bike will be used "around town" (Louisville) so pretty flat. Some small hills. I really only ride fixed gear bikes, doesn't matter what the terrain is.

Scheherezade 

Thanks! That's exactly what I needed to know. Cheers.

tcs

Interesting. Riders were getting 50.000+ kilometers of good service from their Sturmey-Archer hubs one-hundred years ago. Heinz Stucke pedaled his Sachs 3-speed over 500.000 kilometers. In 1939 Tommy Godwin rode 120,805 kilometers - a world record for a single year - using a Sturmey four-speed hub.

In N.A., neither Shimano nor SRAM provide internal parts support. The official word from Shimano seems to be "replace the hub" and corporate SRAM doesn't seem to be aware they sell IGHs in N.A. Sturmey-Archer is arguably best-in-industry with their extensive factory support of small parts, although internal parts for old+rare models or very new models can be sketchy.

interested

Many of the old IGH's like Fichtel and Sachs (F&S) "Torpedo" IGHs were really well engineered and manufactured to high standards. Most modern 3 speed hubs are simply less well made since they are mostly used in "toy bikes" and cheap department store bikes that probably will never be ridden more than 500 km. So the market wants cheap $15 3-speed IGH's, not well crafted $100 3-speed IGHs that last for decades.

Another reason that many of those old 3-speed hubs worked so well was that people in those days were actually maintaining them and repairing them. Everything could be replaced on them, they where simple to service, and since a particular IGH model tended to be in production for a very long time, LBS's became quite accustomed to service them and could stock spare parts in their shop. Items like bikes were expensive, but labor cheap, so people where more accustomed to having their IGH re-greased instead of just riding them until it they broke.

IGH's with more than 3 gears becomes increasingly difficult to design and manufacture; the tolerances becomes much smaller and the wear and tear on the miniaturized parts increase. So it is difficult to make a 8 speed hub that are both affordable and very long lasting. Even Shimano who has so many good engineers, made several attempts to get their 8 speed IGH right. The Rohloff is a modern example of very well made multi-gear IGH, but it has a matching price tag too.

In theory, Shimano Service Centers can get any (recent) spare part with a spare part number, if nothing else they can order it directly from Japan. The problem is of course, that most of the internal gear structure doesn't have a spare part number, so one has to exchange most of the internal gear box assembly in one go.

Shimano's strategy isn't so dumb as it looks like. Diagnosing and repairing the very complex hub gears is time consuming and with no guarantee of success, so if the the shifting problems consist despite repair, the LBS may get an irritated costumer who doesn't want to pay the bill because the problem isn't solved. By exchanging the whole internal assembly the costumers gets a IGH that works like new, and the LBS can have confidence in this rather easy repair.
Sram support for IGHs have been spotty in the EU too, though they try to improve the situation.

--
Regards

Dan Burkhart 

And with matching cranksets and front hubs too. Waiting now for the full gruppo. I'll switch out the headset for a gold one some day.

Airburst

I've never seen a department store bike with an IGH, and my Sturmey-Archer XRD-3 (made about 5 years ago) works fine, and has done a lot of miles.

You're right about the lack of serviceability though, a lot of the new hubs aren't as serviceable as they used to be. Even Sturmey-Archer ones are grease-lubricated rather than using oil these days, so they have to be dismantled to service them. You can put an oiler in though, apparently, if you drill and tap the shell in the appropriate place. Also, many of the internal parts are still obtainable for the standard 3-speed Sturmey-Archer models, as well as some of the ones for the other ones.

tcs

For a $80USD (retail) Nexus 3-speed hub, I could almost shrug my shoulders and go along with replacement of the internal assembly. For a $340 Alfine 8 or $680 Alfine 11, I'd be pretty tiffed if they said I had to buy entire new internals because they wouldn't sell me a spring or a clutch.

noglider 

Interested, very informative. Thank you!

wroomwroomoops

I had several setups with SRAM Spectro S7 (various S7 hubs, not just different frames/other components), and ALL of them broke during the colder days of winter. I effing hated that hub, in the winter.

In a Finnish winter, temperatures can go as low as -28 C, even as south as Helsinki.

wroomwroomoops

You'll lose your gains with the cost of chains and cassettes you'll have to replace. Unless you get them also for approximately free.

wroomwroomoops

Whoever plonks down $72 for that chain tensioner, is barking mad. Just use a freakin' deraileur, which in addition to doing exactly what that chain tensioner does, has the added benefit that you can easily adjust it to any chainline.

wroomwroomoops

The one bike with a Nexus 8 I rode in the winter, indeed failed miserably - at a higher temperature than the SRAM S7, in fact.

This Alfine S501 version of the Nexus 8, is this the one with the red line?

Mr IGH

Red line isn't enough, needs to be the newer Nexus 8R31, 8C31 and 8R36 (which also have red lines). The 8R31, 8C31 and 8R36 red line hubs have the same sealing and internals as the Alfine 501:
https://bike.shimano.com/publish/cont...een%20Hubs.pdf

Lots of folks running these hubs to -40 in extreme climes with no issues.

wroomwroomoops

Thanks for this!!!

By "these", you mean the Alfine 501 version?

AaronAnderson

BTW: I'm going with the S3X on this bike.

I will be putting these wheels onto another C&V bike I have, and getting some modern 700c wheels on this one.

wroomwroomoops

^^Nice bike, Mr. Tall Dude.