TJ:

The modern world:

TJ’s comments are no different to people’s claims about indexed shifting when it came out. Old, narrow-minded and arrogant.

Apart from of course that is not what I said

– I don’t expect it to become common or widely used for a while yet – there’s a way to go on cost reduction for that to happen.

That is what I said – plus it will never be mass market – FFS 9 sp is not mass market.

Crikey – funnily enough I do have one of those phones and I don’t have a mobile 🙂

FFS 9 sp is not mass market

Yeah it is! Not used by everyone, but almost all ‘serious’ mtbs are 9sp.

I think you are trying to talk about the bike market as a whole and others are talking about just mountain biking.

Europe is a totally different market. We have small town cars, they have town bikes with hub gears. Road race is also huge over there, with people having immaculate bikes with all the latest carbon fibre, and colour matching clothes. I’ve no doubt electronic shifting will take off here and I’m sure it’ll pass onto the mountain bike market.

And I actually think it will probably have an impact on most of the bike market eventually. I like the romantic idea of purely human power propelling the bike, but cables are the cause of most peoples gear woes and the reason why bike shops offer ‘services’.

No point arguing though, we’ll just have to wait and see.

And nearly all of the bikes I see around Halfords have a 9 speed block, so I’d argue that it’s certainly mainstream in this country.

Traildog – people were claiming that electronic shifiting is the future, will be seen on all bikes in afew years and so on.

Merely pointing out the fallacy in that. As it will only ever appeal to a small niche it will not get teh economies of scale needed to drive the price down

molgrips – Member

“FFS 9 sp is not mass market”

Yeah it is! Not used by everyone, but almost all ‘serious’ mtbs are 9sp.

My point exactly – serious mtbs are not the mass market. Teh mass market is in cheap mtbs and commuters

Surely we should all be opposed to electronic gear changing?

It is taking a previously stored form of energy (battery) and making it easier to ride.

Sounds just like MXing, except petrol makes up for human effort!

The thin end of the wedge.

Keep MTBing pure!!!

🙂

I agree clarkpm4242

I bet it works wonderfully but I too have an objection to it on a philosophical grounds.

A bicycle is a mechanical objects powered by human muscle and for me there in lies the beauty of a bicycle. The idea of batteries being involved in the heart of a bikes mechanical drive chain leaves me cold.

Does this electronic shifting work like a normal set up? As in one shifter for the rear and one for the front? I imagine it does.

I can see a feature where, when it realises you’re in the middle ring and the largest sprocket and you try to change down at the rear again, it activates the front AND rear mechs at the same time to give you whatever is the next lowest gear in the granny ring (say change down to granny and up 2-3 cogs at the back all at once) And visa-versa going back up again. Now that would be handy, IMO 🙂

cables are the cause of most peoples gear woes and the reason why bike shops offer ‘services’.

Cables are a bit problem on lots of people bike but most of the time they come in with gear problems it’s not only the cable that need attention. Usually gear hanger alignment, chain wear e.t.c also need attention.

And nearly all of the bikes I see around Halfords have a 9 speed block, so I’d argue that it’s certainly mainstream in this country.

Really? Do you sell bikes for less than £500 (or £499 or whatever) that have 9 speed?

Or are ‘nearly all’ of the bikes Halfords sell nowadays the £500 plus MTBs with 9 speed? I’d be surprised if your average person is spending 500 quid or more on an MTB?

Joe

PeterPoddy – Shimano already do an automatic gear shift on one of their “utility” groupsets, designed for commuter bikes, it keeps the cadence within a set parameter and when your cadence drops below or rises above the set limits, it auto changes for you. Designed for people who have no idea of how bikes work! The system itself is amazingly good although very heavy.

80% of gear shifting problems are caused by cables getting kinked, gummed up, worn, rusted, stretched etc. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve come into the shop saying their gears are out of adjustment so they fiddled with the mechs and now it’s worse. Most of the time all it needed was a turn on the barrel adjuster. electronic gears don’t get gummed up, it removes that entire problem, it self adjusts. Shift at the rear and the front mech auto trims to avoid any rubbing on the chain. It’s a tiny bit heavier overall cos of the battery and the servo motors in the mechs, the STI’s themselves are actually lighter than mechanical ones cos it’s removed all the fiddly internals. It’s not an issue anyway because it’s easily possible to build road bikes with Di2 that are illegal to race on because they’re below the UCI minimum weight limit.

TJ, we’re not talking about mass-market hybrids quite yet but within a few years this will be at 105 level and beginning to make an appearance on XTR, few years later it’ll be the norm on road bikes and down to SLX level on MTBs.

From what you’re saying I’m guessing you’ve probably never even seen it in real life, never mind used it or built a bike with it/set it up from scratch?

Usually gear hanger alignment, chain wear e.t.c also need attention.

Di2 can automatically account for gear hanger alignment up to a point and chain wear too. It carries on moving the mech until the chain moves to the next sproket. I’m no shiTmano fan but I’m convinced that Di2 or similar is the way forward for racers and most enthusiasts

A bicycle is a mechanical objects powered by human muscle and for me there in lies the beauty of a bicycle. The idea of batteries being involved in the heart of a bikes mechanical drive chain leaves me cold.

Just charge the battery using a dynamo or attach it to your turbo trainer or something. Viola, its human muscule powered again, just way more efficient as wasted energy can be stored for use later rather then needing thumb power on tap all the time!

Hell you could even charge the battery using braking energy recovery like an F1 car!

(The amount of electricity required for shifting gears is rediculously tiny, just plug it in once a month and be happy with your neatly trimmed gears)

TJ, we’re not talking about mass-market hybrids quite yet but within a few years this will be at 105 level and beginning to make an appearance on XTR, few years later it’ll be the norm on road bikes and down to SLX level on MTBs.

Which is a very small niche within the mass market. Most people buy cheap bikes, the main european market in bikes would not include this

its only ever going to be a niche / small scale bit of kit

Doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea though.

I reckon it’s the single biggest innovation in gears since the advent of indexed shifting.

I thought that while the system knows which gear it’s supposed to be in, it doesn’t know when the chain has moved exactly. I thought that it over-shifted slightly then snapped back. Like when your normal gears are a bit **** and you have to shift up twice and down once to get to the next gear.

I’m not sure you’d want to have the system do both mechs at once without warning you, but that would depend on how smooth the front shift is. You can get away with rear shifts at much higher power outputs than front shifts, so I’d want some warning that the gears were about to go a bit more mental than I expected.

I like the idea of being able to set a cadence and have the shifts keep you at that cadence, though it’s the sort of thing the UCI would ban.

To the chap that was “left cold” at the thought – did it really???

crazy legs – I think its an interesting idea and to move the tech on you have to go down a load of dead ends.

I just thought it laughable the suggestion that this was the future of cycling and all bikes will have it in a few years – its so obviously not true given where the vast bulk of the sales are.

Alright then, all ROAD bikes will have it in a few years and it will have been introduced onto MTBs at XTR level as well, it will then gradually trickle down in the same way.

Better? Pedant…

😉

Some top end road bikes? It won’t be on the middle and bottom end of the market.

it will be in the middle (however you define it, £1000-1500?) within 10years, I’d be willing to bet a top of the range groupset on that.

Which is a very small niche within the mass market

We are clearly talking about the ‘nice bike’ market. The cheap £99 market is a totally different thing.

Safe to assume that when people on here are talking about ‘all bikes’ they mean all decent bikes.

PP – possibly, although I do not think that woudl be popular. You have to be aware of shifting on derailleur systems and if it suddenly shifted the front when you weren’t expecting it and didn’t slacken off, you’d have a lot of dropped and mangled chains.

It could very easily just beep at you though to alert a dodgy combination and not shift. Or maybe a calm computer voice saying ‘I’m sorry Peter, I cannot do that. That gear combination is invalid’

Just charge the battery using a dynamo or attach it to your turbo trainer or something. Viola, its human muscule powered again, just way more efficient as wasted energy can be stored for use later rather then needing thumb power on tap all the time!

Hell you could even charge the battery using braking energy recovery like an F1 car!

(The amount of electricity required for shifting gears is rediculously tiny, just plug it in once a month and be happy with your neatly trimmed gears)

It’s not the same direct human power, I could sit on a turbo trainer all day charge some batteries ten ride and electric motor bike. Like I said I’m sure it works well but it looses the beauty of a mechanical object.

P.S. Regenerative braking is not practical for a bike.

it is still mechanical, the chain isn’t pulled across by magnets 🙄

I like the idea of it, especially the automatic trim for the front mech, but right now it looks like a question I haven’t yet asked.

Bike 1 has Shimano SLX/XT gears with only small sections of outer cable.

Bike 2 has SRAM X9 gears and outer cable coverage from shifter to rear mech.

Bike 2 needs far less maintenence and adjustment than bike 1, moreover an overhaul of my gears is only required once a year maximum and costs me £14 for new cables. Bike 1 on the other hand seems to require frequent gear fettling and oiling thanks to the exposed inners running underneath the downtube.

I’d go so far as to suggest that provision for decent cable routing would solve a great many gear shifting problems at far lower cost than electronic shifting, possibly at a lower weight penalty too.

Am I wrong?

Molgrips – so by “all bikes” you actually mean a very small niche at the top of the market? 🙄

Decent bikes? Get a perfectly decent bike for well under £1000.

It’s not the same direct human power, I could sit on a turbo trainer all day charge some batteries ten ride and electric motor bike. Like I said I’m sure it works well but it looses the beauty of a mechanical object.

Taking a few watts off from your legs to create electricity is a beautiful process to me.

Plus all the other stuff we have nowadays that only needs a few watts – I think making bikes make electricity is something they should all do. Maybe electric shifting could help popularize it.

PP – possibly, although I do not think that woudl be popular. You have to be aware of shifting on derailleur systems and if it suddenly shifted the front when you weren’t expecting it and didn’t slacken off, you’d have a lot of dropped and mangled chains.

You’ve not ridden new XT then? Front shifting requires no backing off that I can feel. 🙂

It would work fine, IMO.

We all know there’s a crossover on gear ratios between the different rings: Imagine a set up that knew exactly what ratios you had, and you had a single up/down shifter and it seleceted the next lowest/highest ratio from the selection available. You could probably ditch a couple of sprockets in the long run…..

PeterPoddy – Shimano already do an automatic gear shift on one of their “utility” groupsets, designed for commuter bikes, it keeps the cadence within a set parameter and when your cadence drops below or rises above the set limits, it auto changes for you. Designed for people who have no idea of how bikes work! The system itself is amazingly good although very heavy.

I didn’t know that, thanks! So, it proves advanced control is possible, albeit that advanced being pointless on an MTB.

But hey, if you could flick it into ‘auto’ when you felt like taking it easy, how cool would that be? 🙂

———–
EDIT

I think this electronic shifing sounds s**t hot! I really hope it becomes cheaper for us pikey-bikers 😉

Molgrips – so by “all bikes” you actually mean a very small niche at the top of the market?

Yes, and so do most of the rest of us. You have a talent for taking what we say to some extreme case that we all know damn well we’re not talking about, then arguing about it 🙂

Decent bikes? Get a perfectly decent bike for well under £1000.

When I say decent I mean £3-400+ Also ftr I am not saying it’ll be on every bike – just that it could become quite common on top end bikes. Which is to say much more than just a small niche within the decent bike market which yes I know is a niche in wider society obviously

We all know there’s a crossover on gear ratios between the different rings: Imagine a set up that knew exactly what ratios you had, and you had a single up/down shifter and it seleceted the next lowest/highest ratio from the selection available. You could probably ditch a couple of sprockets in the long run…..

Yes but how often do you think “oh, my 47″ gear is too high for this, I need my next lowest gear increment which is 44″ so to accomplish that I need to do one change at the front and two at the back”

You don’t, you just do one shift and fractionally alter your cadence.
The advent of 10sp on MTBs has made it possible to run a double chainring set up with a wide range cassette which minimises the cross-over ratios at the ends. The last thing I’d want is a gear system that thinks it “knows” what gear I should be in, I’d HATE that.

Yes but how often do you think “oh, my 47″ gear is too high for this, I need my next lowest gear increment which is 44″ so to accomplish that I need to do one change at the front and two at the back”

You don’t, you just do one shift and fractionally alter your cadence

Exactly. Because you don’t know which gear is actually the next lowest. Electronics could do that for you. 🙂 I’m just thinking of what could be done with it, what it might be possible to develop 🙂

It’s just control systems that you’re talking about now. You could choose to have or not have that shift pattern, or you could choose it to beep at you to let you know that you’ve missed a gear out when you changed down.

The computer doesn’t know if the next gear will be up or down again, you could double tap a button after the beep to tell the computer that the next shift will be in the same direction as the last, and then it could do the front mech too for you. If you wanted. I’m sure there are better ways of doing it, but anything is possible.

PP, isn’t this what you mean?

Sequential Shifting MTB

Duplicate gears are ignored, and Woznick adds that the programming is designed to minimise cross-chaining and front derailleur shifts as well. “As the bike sits, it’s completely linear: two shift buttons, one for up and one for down,” he said. “It can go from the 29/32T to the 42/11T, hitting all 13 equally spaced gears with only one front derailleur shift and without cross-chaining.”

Including a fully automatic system.

ACJIM – Yup. Sounds brilliant!

If you’re gonna go electronic, why not go the whole hog eh? 🙂

Does sound great I think – if it had a low drag magnetic dynamo (in the mech?) and was less money than my car I’d be there.

At least you could have tiny buttons placed wherever you want, instead of quite a bulky mechanism.

A screen showing current ratio and gear inches too please.

TJ you seem to be saying that “mass market” means the very largest portion?

Whereas others are arguing that it could also mean say a “significant market”?

Really not worth arguing about.

Intersting quote off bikeradar

“That’s just the next step for the zero-maintenance ‘cross bike,” he said. “The Di2 stuff is amazing. You set it up at the beginning of the year and, provided you don’t bend your derailleur hanger in shipping, you forget about it for the rest of the year and maybe charge the battery if you remember to or maybe not – whatever.

“Initially I thought that the differentiation between the upshift and downshift paddle was a little close but now that I’ve gotten used to it it’s so great. On a day like today where it’s bumpy and cold, and your fingers are all numb anyway, it’s so nice to just feel that tap and get a perfect shift every time. The motors are strong enough to work in the mud. I’m super-impressed.”

At least you could have tiny buttons placed wherever you want, instead of quite a bulky mechanism.

Yep. K.I.S.S! No ratchets and less bits of plastic to break!

A screen showing current ratio and gear inches too please.

Linked into a Shimano Flight Deck computer I reckon. Job jobbed!

Or, link into GPS. Then, the next time you ride the same trail, the bike would know exactly where to shift, or that a hill was coming up/down and be in the right chainring, ready. Similar stuff happens in Moto GP and F1…. 🙂

Ohh, this a geeks wet dream, isn’t it? 😉