Soooooo...I hadn't intended for this to be a thread to go back and forth about IGH or to explain why we mix and match or to say what parts we currently used. I wanted to as a forum come together and figure out sort of a reality based dream gruppo for touring. What are features we would want if Shimano or SRAM or Campy came to us and said you can have what you want (within the limits of technology and reason). Don't feel as if you are locked into what already exists have some imagination, don't worry about budget or anything like that, none of this is real.

Half the fun of BF is a food fight, . Seriously I think that the two "premium" options, IGH vs a high quality derailleur system have been well discussed and argued.

The problem for tourists is that the existing off the shelf derailleur based systems are becoming somewhat more difficult to piece together. Campy never cared much for touring groups. SRAM is doing a nice job of pushing the envelope on big cassettes and simplified gearing up front but I think that tourists will continue to stick with triples. That leaves Shimano. You can piece together a pretty good system using Shimano stuff but it is not as simple as it used to be when road and mtb stuff was fairly interchangeable.

I have my doubts, but for arguments sake, lets say you're that skilWithin 10-20 PSI isn't precise enough to be useful. It certainly isn't precise enough to keep your efficiency within a 2 percent range.

A derailer equipped bike is nowhere near 99 percent efficient. 99 percent efficient is a no frill fixed gear bike, well maintained, with a perfectly straight chainline, ridden at very low speeds.

Let's compare like against like. You aren't going to buy 15 derailer systems of Rohloff quality for the price of a single Rohloff hub. And there's more to the cost of a derailer system than the purchase price of a rear derailer. The chains are more expensive. Steel sprockets and chainrings aren't readily available, so fast wearing aluminum ones must be used. Maintenance isn't free, unless your time is worth nothing and you do it yourself. Total cost of ownership favors the Rohloff.

Nonsense. Both may fail, but one of them is much more likely to do so. If the expected repair cost of option A is 9x more than the expected repair cost of option B, but option B is 10x more likely to fail, then option A is the better choice. In the case of Rohloff versus derailers, the increased reliability makes up for the increased cost in the unlikely event of failure.

Jaywalk3r, the article I linked you, written by Bernhard Rolhoff, found a derailleur-equipped bike to be up to 99% efficient. Did you read it?

A bicycle is not 99% efficient. The drivetrain is 99% efficient at transferring energy to the wheels. Any losses from tire pressure, wind, or load are neither here nor there.

If my derailleur is failing, I can easily see it coming long in advance. I can gerry-rig a solution using found parts, fiberglass paste, coca cola cans, JB weld, hot glue, crazy glue, zip ties, paracord, etc. I can even remove it in two seconds and run SS back to civilization. Bent derailleur cages can be re-bent, derailleur springs are easily replaced, missing derailleur screws are found all over or suitable replacements can be bought at hardware stores, and pulley wheels are interchangeable across hundreds of models, globally sold.

A Rolhoff is not field-reparable. It's completely enclosed, has an embarrassment of minutia ad infinitum, and needs to be kept completely clean while being worked on.

Good point. There's wiggle room available if you run friction shifters (which many tourists do, myself included, since they're field-serviceable).

I have Dura-Ace bar-end shifters. Don't be impressed; they're all dura-ace. Anyways, the 10-speed Dura Ace shifter, set to friction, works perfectly fine with my 9-speed Shimano XT rear derailleur.

My front derailleur, Shimano Sora, is road-specced and works well with the Shimano 46/34 Sora compact double.

Why Sora?

Because, Shimano now uses an asymmetrical mount for everything 105 and above. That means the traditional 5-hole symmetrical rings can't be used as replacements anymore. Once, all across the land, replacement chainrings were available. Now, they'll have to be special ordered unless you bump down a few gruppos.

So, my drivetrain has:

Road Crankset
Road Front Derailleur
Road Shifters
Road Handlebars
Road Frame
Mountain Rear Derailleur
Mountain Front Hub
Mountain Rear Hub
Mountain Disc Brakes
Mountain Rims

My bottom bracket is a little bit of a bastard child... The Praxis Works 68mm Converter BB lets me use a Hollowtech II crankset in a Pressfit 30 bottom bracket shell, letting me avoid the BS of eccentric bottom brackets or the awful, awful BB30.

With certain assumptions, including a straight chainline.

Clearly, you missed the point (again).

What's your point, Jaywalk3r?

You're concerned about a two percent loss of efficiency from the drivetrain, but not concerned about a much bigger loss of efficiency by from running tires at suboptimal inflation levels. Two percent is lost in the noise. It's inconsequential in the real world.

Ok, YOU can't feel 2% noise. YOU don't care about 4-5 pounds of extra weight (quoting you, not weighing an IGH). YOU don't mind the occasional maintenance. YOU don't feel irreplaceability is a drawback.

You have an opinion. it does not eliminate fact. The fact is, it's 2% less efficient and heavier, and cannot be easily replaced in remote areas. There is a large following of people on this forum that count their touring weight to within a tenth of an ounce to try and remove as much as possible, and then set records for endurance and speed.

For The "Ultimate" Touring Gruppo to be 2% less efficient and significantly heavier, well, that doesn't sound very "Ultimate" to me. Sounds like you're ignoring drawbacks to placate yourself, since you spent so much money.

Its looking like a long winter ahead, from this hamster wheel thread.

A gearing system less reliable than the Rohloff is, by the same logic, not very "ultimate." It sounds like you're ignoring drawbacks to placate yourself, since you already spent so much money on your derailer based system.

Further, had you actually been reading my posts, instead of simply defending derailers, you would know that I don't own the Rohloff. I mentioned that more than once. I'm happy with my NuVinci. Only for touring in certain terrains would I trade it for a Rohloff. I can't think of any scenario in which I'd go back to derailers.

That cyclists cling to derailers isn't surprising. Many people were equally reluctant to give up their older, easy to work on, automobiles. The drastically increased reliability of newer cars, however, has won over most people.

Untrue, for standard hubs you could easily internet order a pre-built wheel or buy one off the rack, rather than hunt down a wheel-builder.

Huh?


I don't know where you live but you can stop playing the "people don't ride bikes in the US so they don't know anything about bicycles" card. The products "forced on us by the Bicycle industry" are what sells. IGH doesn't. I work in a bicycle co-op on Saturdays all year around and the number of IGH bikes that aren't 3 speeds we see per year can be counted on one hand. The number of IGH bikes I see on the road per year...150 to 200 days of riding...can be counted on the same hand.

Finally, you are talking to an audience that rides more then the average US citizen. We might just know something about bicycles and bicycle components. We done our homework as well and come to a different conclusion than you.

Ladies and gentlemen, Logic has left the building.

With derailleurs, your back-up plan is horizontal dropouts, so you can convert to singlespeed, and a spare DT friction lever.
With Rohloff, the back-up plan is a 4-bolt sprocket for fixed-gear

Another around-the-world bike tourer, Tom Bruce, also had issues with his Rolhoff hub. He had to replace his Rolhoff hub in China at about 10,000 miles into his venture. It took a lot of coordination and help to get the new hub to him. His book, "Every Inch of the Way", is a good read and gives a good account of the problem. However, he had some good things to about Rolhoff hubs on this forum, which I couldn't understand why he felt that way after reading his book.

Only now?

I think bar-end shifters tied to a mountain bike ratio drivetrain using a "low-normal" rear derailer is the best configuration (this makes sure that both bar ends pull the derailers in the same direction, defaulting to your lowest gear). Compatible parts need to be easily obtainable. Of course, this limits the 'ultimate' group down to a really really really narrow range of not all that pricey, older generation Shimano parts. Does anyone make a better mechanical disc brake than the Avid BB7?

The real bling on a touring bike, of course, is the frame, and then all of your gear- bags, racks, saddle... and having a job where you both get paid enough to own a fancy touring bike but also get enough vacation time to go rambling

I hate to join in on the bigger wang contest, but perhaps, just maybe, IGHs and derailleur systems both work very well for touring. Maybe the choice comes down to whether you like to tinker. The derailleur crowd likes derailleurs because they're easy to understand and easy to work on when something goes wrong. The IGH crowd doesn't want to deal with maintenance and tinkering with the bike as often and will gladly give up some maintenance control to have specialists work on the parts when needed.

As a tinkerer myself, I prefer derailleurs, canti brakes, downtube shifters, etc. However, as a bike mechanic, I work on all sorts of bikes. The SRAM IGHs are fairly common among commuters here. I've never been asked to fix or overhaul one of these. I have worked on some Sturmey Archers. The "fix" has always been to contact Sturmey Archer for the replacement internal mechanism. From what I see on a regular basis, here's a list of stuff I would NOT add to the "ultimate" touring bike:

- Carbon fiber anything (delaminations, cracks, precise torque specs)
- Wheelsets with anything other than j-bend, double-butted spokes, with brass nipples exposed at the rims
- disc brakes
- pedals without an allen key recess in the spindle
- anything other than English threaded bottom brackets
- suspension using air pressure
- narrow tires
- electronic shifting systems
- internal or integrated headsets

Components or frame specs that I do think qualify to be put on the "ultimate" touring bike are easy to service and easy to replace, if needed:

- 1 1/8" external cup threadless headsets
- Hollowtech II or GXP cranksets
- rim brake calipers
- rear vertical dropouts
- downtube shifters or other shifters with a friction mode option
- platform pedals with recessed allen key holes
- Chain with a detachable link

+1 Deraillers are finicky clunky stupid technology. Crisp silent shifting is a fairytale on a sunny day, nevermind a dirty puddle day. Groupo's , levels, WTF cares. The mechanics forum is half full of derailler stupidness. How many 1000s of them since the 1902 to forever SA 3 speed??? My SA 5 speed had a sticky clutch but it had speed to burn on any downslope, 45 mph easy.

So now I have a Rohloff 14. Zero doubt in my mind it is the Rolls Royce of hubs. 100% Perfect shifts and ratio jumps, 22 to 120 GI. They are pretty stiff out of the box, but it is catching up to the SA efficency after 2700 miles. The Rohloff cogs are as wimpy as cassettes for sure so I'm going to weld a 16T SA cog on there. That will get me 18,000 stump pulling miles. I'm still stuck with an aluminum chainrings that croak in 6000.

Shimano hubs are the unserviceable ones. SAs are childsplay. The Rohloff gasket is less fun, I have a spare already. Most of the parts are paint by number disassembly. The oil draining is harder than cleaning deraillers??? LOL I'll be in Vietnam and China soon. I'll be looking and looking for those imaginary spare derailler parts, chains.

My Rohloff with no shifter still is a 14 x SS. Your deR will have maybe one. A 1/8 chain = walking.

It's not about tinkering vs set-and-forget. Sure, it can be, bikes and componentry are very personal choices. Every single part and technology has pros/cons and ultimately, the duty of anyone who contributes on these forums is to lay out those pros/cons. Ultimately, someone reading these threads has to make a choice and we all have to respect that choice... but in the mean time, we do need to edit one another and make sure that the advice is legit.

If someone wants to tour with an internally geared hub, that's a choice. From a touring consensus, it's a bad choice. It falls under the same category as people using a 26" wheel instead of 700c if they tour South America or Africa, it's about availability of parts to keep a tour going, in places where there is no UPS/Fedex. It's a choice I disagree with, even traveling across the US, because if there is an issue (as unlikely as that is) the tour will be delayed a week. I suppose it isn't such a big deal if the rider is retired and has all the time in the world... but most people on bicycle tours have jobs to get back to and don't have time to wait for a new internally geared hub to arrive on the freight truck and then find a local shop to build up the wheel. The argument against using an IGH is reasonable, it's not a bigger-wang contest, it's a disclaimer and a warning for anyone reading this thread who doesn't understand these things. If you want to tour and not have any problems, be sure to use parts that are easily available along the way (which is itself dependent on where a given person is riding). That's the root of the disagreement here, best I can tell.

The point is to understand the consequences, and then decide the cost/benefit of taking the risk, however small (and that is a personal choice, in the end). I'm guilty of my own touring-sin. I use integrated shifters (Campy) rather than something simple and repairable like bar-ends. That's a personal choice, it's not an ideal choice, but I'm prepared for the consequences. I use parts that aren't made to work together, mixing Campy and Shimano... again, a choice, maybe a bad choice. I'm aware of the pros and cons and I'm prepared to deal with any problems that creep up. I'm not going to mislead some forum reader into believing that my choice is a good choice just because it works for me, I'm going to lay out the facts and then walk away. Make up your own mind, dear reader. That's how it should work.

TRP Spyre is a marginally better(?) design and more modern; it uses two pistons and the pad wear is equalized without the need to constantly adjust the non-moving pad. Nothing is more tested than the BB7 though, it's been around a while. So "better" *shrugs* better is subjective and needs to be defined.

I ride both IGH and derailleur bikes. One, the IGH, is my everyday bike and the other is for exercise and light-weight fun. I can service and/or repair either one. Each has its advantages and I like both for how I use them.

I want to build a touring rig. For practical reason$, it shall get down the road with a derailleur drive train. I plan to build a Surly-framed (LHT disc) bike with a Shimano XT group set. I'm fine with the MTB-style handlebar and shifters. I won't buy another bike with anything but hydraulic disc brakes (Wabi excepted). The combination of the Surly frame with its geometry (virtually the same as my Diamondback STI-8) and the quality, gearing, brakes etcetera of the XT group set promise to make a reliable and serviceable touring bike. It will be expensive for me to build but I should just be able to do it.

Were money not an issue I'd go Rohloff and belt drive.

Some Notes: (turns into a rant ;o)
I was around during motorcycling's transition to disc brakes. Find a bike now that does not have them. The only maintenance they require is pad and fluid replacement (the latter is seldom actually done). This will be the case with upper end bicycles very soon now and we won't look back, as they say.

I was involved with Harley's testing of belt drive in the mid-seventies; it is a proven technology. They no longer build production bikes with chain final drive. The belt on any Hog can be expected to last well over 100,000 miles with no maintenance whatsoever. BTW: A Sportster needs nine horsepower to go 60mph and a full touring rig 12.8; our needs are puny by comparison.

Chains are a PITA and no one, except maybe FBinNY, me and a few others ;o), takes proper care of them. I'd rather not deal with chains because it drives me crazy (not a long trip) how they grind themselves into powder because they are so exposed. The compromises required to make a chain work on derailleur systems make them rather short lived. The life expectancy of my KMC 10-speed chain shall be very much shorter than my 1/8” Wippermann solid bushing chain with its steel sprockets on the IGH machine (don’t think I’ll ever wear out the Wippermann).

Bicycle (mechanical) brakes are also a PITA. And, on a heavy touring rig, they can even be dangerous because they might blow a tire from the heat or simply fade, like our racing brakes of 50 years ago. A loaded touring bike making the downhill run going east out of Yosemite or the west descent of the Sonora Pass is tougher on brakes than anything TDF racers face, yet --- we get their brakes instead of the ones we ought to have. Can you even imagine buying a car that runs its brake pads on the rims of the wheels ----?

Typical bicycle brakes flex, de-adjust themselves and require more attention than any motorcycle or automotive brake system I've ever worked on. I am a very competent mechanic/engineer I know what I'm doing and don't like what I see.

Okay, rant over.

Joe

The mechanics forum is full of derailer problems but almost all of them are because the user doesn't understand how to work on the mechanism and make them worse. Nearly every problem with derailers is related to cable stretch and can be fixed in 30 seconds but usually takes longer because the user starts turning screws that have nothing to do with the problem. I suspect that similar problems...or worse...would arise if people started trying to "adjust" their IGH hubs without knowing what they were doing.

I don't know what you are doing to your chainrings but I get far more than 6000 miles out of a set of aluminum chainrings even when mountain biking.

Shimano hubs are unserviceable?! Since when. It's news to me considering that I teach people how to service Shimano hubs three or 4 times a day when I volunteer at my local co-op.

Some notes on your rant:

Motorcycles made a transistion from drum brakes to discs. Bicycle rim brakes are disc brakes to begin with, just ones with really large rotors. Going from a rim brake to a hub mounted disc is really only a lateral move and not nearly as large a change as the transistion that motorcycles went through.

I'll just say that I disagree about chains and how to care for them.

I live in mountains. I tour in mountains...and western mountains have nothing to compare to the steep pitches you'll find in the mountains of the eastern US. I throw myself down mountains with as much speed as I can muster on loaded touring bike, unloaded bikes, mountain bikes (off-road) and loaded touring mountain bikes (again off-road) in all kinds of conditions. I've never found a place where a cantilever brake on a touring bike is insufficient, overheats a tire enough to blow a tire off a rim, nor fades. That includes a 50mph downhill off the top of New Found Gap on the Tennessee/North Carolina border in a driving rain as well as a 50 mph twisty downhill from Fayetteville, WV back down to the New River Gorge (no rain but steep pitches), and a 50+ mph 20 mile long downhill from the top of Loveland Pass to Georgetown along I-70 which has a high enough pucker factor that the saddle and part of the frame disappear...if you know what I mean You have to know how to use your brakes, of course, which most people don't.

Finally, I'm not sure if you are talking about hub mounted disc or rim brakes but I've noticed that hub mounted disc flex and de-adjust themselves more than any bicycle brake I've used. You have to be very, very careful about how much binding force you use on the front hub to keep the wheel from camming out of the dropouts.

If we're still voting:
I would NOT tour on an IGH. I've tried it and didn't like it (heavy-ish feel, worry about unservice-ability, gearing range, etc). I do commute on an IGH daily and love it.
I would NOT likely tour unsupported on a CF frame. I have done light touring (with support options) on CF, --but long or exotic trip totally unsupported?, ...nah.
I prefer the simplicity of canti rim brakes.
I prefer brifters but might carry downtube levers just in case.
My light tourers are 650B but I would probably choose 26" for long or exotic tours.
Shimano 105 or maybe ultegra.
Probably dynamo front hub for lights and charging options.