I thought the Rohloff stand was a lot of fun to look at. The main news this year is that they’re now doing a 142mm through-axle frame compatible Rohloff hub for mountain bikes, in quite a few anodised colours too. Most of the bikes on the stand had Gates Carbondrive belts, some were fat, and filled that niche that is the absolute darling of you all: e-bikes.
Look at this! It’s the HNF Heisenberg XF1, and has almost all of the niches. The main principal here is the uncertainty about where this bike actually is when you ride it.Close up of the Heisenberg.The motor swings with the suspension to maintain belt tension.Come on, you secretly want one.
Here are the new Rohloff hubs, which have been billed by some as through-axle hubs, but that’s not strictly true. They’re through-axle compatible, and have a range of 526% putting them firmly in the same ballpark as 2×10 or 3×9 setups.
Here’s the axle, which incorporates the gearing mechanism to save weight.Making a true through-axle geared hub would make it heavy and enormous.Here’s where it meets the frame…… using screw in adapters. Standard through axle adapters above, Syntace ones below. Shimano adapters not pictured. They fit with a 5mm allen key.They had various widths and adapters on show.You may have to measure your dropout width to get exactly the right adapters and bolts from Rohloff.No Boost ones though! Apparently a completely different engineering problem when it comes to gearhubs, beyond the ken of a simple adapter.
As well as the information above, Rohloff Sales Manager Stewart Stabik told me a bunch of other useful stuff. While the hubs are low maintenance and only require the oil changed once a year, that doesn’t necessarily mean a low maintenance wheel. These are not fit and forget, you need to check your spoke tensions. Building also has some pitfalls, with spoke head length requirement of 2.9 +/- 0.1mm. It’s a seldom listed measurement when you’re buying spokes, and (for instance) SAPIM recently switch to 2.7mm spoke head lengths. Using the wrong spokes can lead to flange fatigue, but Rohloff make special orders of spokes with the correct dimensions. If you’re planning to build one of these hubs up, if you get your spokes through the same distributor as the hub, things should be fine.
Another really interesting thing we saw was a prototype trigger shifter for Rohloff hubs, by former SRAM engineer Georg Blaschke. Shown below running with modified X9 shifters, it had a transparent panel to make the gubbins visible.
Modified trigger shifters…… with a Rohloff compatible back end.At present, one shifter for up, the other for down.
There’s a little bit of information in English further down on this Gebla page.
This bike doesn’t seem to be on the website of French company SVO yet, but here we have an SVO Strato,and an SVO Pronto, both Rohloff equipped and launching direct from SVO mid-November.Rohloff equipped Stevens Fatbike, which opted for a sensible black.Fat
As well as black, they had orange,green,red, and a blue one (not pictured) perched high up on a display case.SVO Pronto.
Finally, imagining it had been retrieved by wreck divers or something, I asked about the damaged hub pictured below on the right. As you’d expect there’s story behind it: Someone tried to steal a Rohlhoff-hubbed bike from a shed, in which it was chained down. Failing in this, they set the shed on fire out of spite, and the owner sent the hub back to Rohloff asking “Can anything be salvaged from this?”
David started mountain biking in the 90’s, by which he means “Ineptly jumping a Saracen Kili Racer off anything available in a nearby industrial estate”. After growing up and living in some extremely flat places, David moved to Yorkshire specifically for the mountain biking. This felt like a horrible mistake at first, because the hills are so steep, but you get used to them pretty quickly.
Previously, David trifled with road and BMX, but mountain bikes always won. He’s most at peace battering down a rough trail, quietly fixing everything that does to a bike, or trying to figure out if that one click of compression damping has made things marginally better or worse. The inept jumping continues to this day.
