Having just built up a bike with a second-hand Alfine 11, I’ll bear all this in mind 🙂

As to point 10, I’ll add two tips
Rohloff oil kit is cheaper & better than Shimano, and
eBay syringe kit is also cheaper than Shimano.

I’ll add another: don’t assume that because the yellow dots are accurately lined up that the Alfine is setup correctly

I must’ve done about 8k miles on mine (commuting) before realising I should have changed the oil some time before. I recommend doing it sooner. The eBay kit makes it easy.

8/11ths of the gears but with 8/11ths of the hassles.

Is the 8 any better with torque?

I used to have a hybrid bike with a SRAM iMotion 3 hub gear

Same hassles

I’ll not go over it again, as it pretty much echos the comments above – it’s all here though if anyone wants to waste a few mins…

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/talk-to-me-about-hub-gears

I don’t get this statement?

Alfine 8 and Sturmey 3 experimenter here. Still waiting to hear anything good about the 11 spd…..

Don’t like the mushy feeling of the Alfine (roller clutches not pawls in there) or the weight. Silence (roller clutches) also means you can spook walkers (my Hope ss hub is useful for subtle warning of approach). Weight also an issue. And that 1:1 ratio isn’t direct drive – it spins lots of cogs to achieve it.

The Sturmey improves on some things – proper direct drive in 1:1. Feels much less mushy. Lighter. But absolutely no sealing. Their 135mm axle is a bodge with loads of spacers and liable to bend due to resultant inboard bearing position. The nuts / anti turn washers are so poor they make Alfine stuff look like CNC bling. And the ratio spread isn’t really enough – OK for short sharp stuff like Kentmere in the Lakes but broke me on long steep climbs in Alps 🙂

Almost feels like the perfect affordable hub gear combo could be made but nobody wants to.

SRAM Automatix looked promising (2 speed; shifts automatically up based on hub rotational speed) but apparently the sealing is also crap, and you can’t change the shift point without bodging. I sometimes wonder how much ‘D’ SRAM’s R&D dept actually do (see also Hammerschmidt).

I did look at a hug gear as being the holy grail of winterproofing my commuter bike, but having only had the hub for a few months I’ve still to experience the all of the “joys” described above.

I’m running a 5 speed Sturmey with disk mount. It was great fun building the wheel myself. Putting it on the bike was less fun. I echo the comments on the anti-turn washers above, and indexing the gears is a fiddle – perhaps it’s my failing eyesight, but lining up a blob of paint on the chain thing that goes into the axle through a plastic roller was a PITA.

Cable stretch (hopefully only initially) makes the indexing go out quite easily. It only needs to be a fraction out before I get gear slippage.

I need to ease off a lot when changing gears, and like the Alfines, my Sturmey hub doesn’t like a lot of force through the pedals (when indexing is a fraction out) – last night I nearly went OTB going up a steep hill when the gears slipped.

Finally, I have strained my thumb, which I can only attribute to the overly stiff shifter that came with the hub. 🙄

The jury is out, but I recognise some of the problems

Sounds like I’m almost alone in liking the Alfine 8 then? There are a couple of things that I don’t like about it, primarily the weight but also the slow take-up of the roller clutches.
Incidentally, I also used to believe that the 1:1 gear (5th) used the gear train but apparently it doesn’t – there was a link from John Dalhart to a Shimano document about this on the mtbr forums but the link doesn’t work now – this is all I can find. clicky .
The roller clutch is, of course, still used in 5th and that must be where the slow engagement comes from, as on my hub 5th is the worst gear in this respect.
I’ve been using one for over three years on a Singular Hummingbird, usually geared at 32:22 but on occasion as low as 28:23 and it’s been faultless in that time. I’ve stripped it down a couple of times and re-lubed it -I use Rocol Aerospec 100 semi-liquid grease,(as used by Flybe as Bombardier Q400 prop grease) – it seems ideal for the job.
It gets used in pretty crappy conditions too.

The Zerode index plate in a Sram X9 shifter is much nicer than the Alfine shifter IMO if you can live without gear indication.

If I was starting all over again with that bike I’d probably go 1X10 with clutch mech, NW chainring and One Up 42T sprocket (like on my Alpitude). I’d save some weight, that’s for sure and have faster engagement and a wider gear range.

For Alfine-11, that’s the first service interval – thereafter it’s every 3500km IIRC (so a smidge over 2000 miles). As my hub is on my wet weather/winter commuter, that’s pretty much annual mileage for the bike, which I can live with.

I change the oil in my Rohloff once a year. The service interval is 5000km. I ride to work off road all year round and I reckon chain maintenance to be around 2 minutes a week in the worst winter conditions. I get 3-4 years from a chain. I’m sat down with a hot cup of tea or a cold beer while your degreasing. Sorry but your tea’s gone cold and your beer’s now warm. 🙂

Not as relevant for an on road commuter I know, where a cheap drivetrain will still last ages with very little maintenance.

Since the Alfine 11 seems to piss it’s oil over the back wheel/disc Katie’s given up adding oil to it. Has run fine for a year/some 1000’s of miles like that so we’ll see what happens.

One word for hubs – Rohloff – truly work and starting to seem very reasonably priced compared to new 1x set ups.

For the spanner requirement on Alfine, can you still buy cool tools?

I have two of those cool tools – used to use it one on my Nexus 8 on my commuter Birdy, ’til it got nicked.

No it doesn’t, and you can still get your wheels off fast.*

You can get Sturmey-Archer wingnuts on eBay. An Alfine can use ordinary wingnuts.

I reckon I can have my wheel out in much the same time as a QR getting past a derailleur.

As far as reliability is concerned, almost all hubgear problems start with poor cables, either adjustment or stiction from rust, tight turns or kinks in the cable. Don’t ride the hub without sorting out the cables or you will damage it. In that case it’s not unreliability, but poor maintenance.

Ideally all hubgears should have internal indexing like the Rohloff.

(Sorry don’t have a pic of my S-A wingnut setup, so used this one)