In a careless and reckless letter,
service@rohloff.de wrote to our own MacSpud:
"The wider chainline will make fitting a chainglider tight in some frames but that is irrelevent because the new splined are constructed without the seal lip which current Hebie Chaingliders requires for mounting. As such there is currently no chainglider available from Hebie that will function with the new splined sprockets. Hebie have had to re-think their chainglider numerous times over the years due to poor design and I regret I am currently unaware as to whether Hebie plan to do this again for the new splined sprockets, or drop it from their product catalog completely."
No, it isn't "irrelevent" (sic) that the redesigned Rohloff sprocket, soon to be the only Rohloff sprocket, will cause the chain or a Chainglider if fitted to interfere with the frame. That's careless of customers with tightfitting frames and/or a preference for Chaingliders.
It gets worse. When customers liked the Hebie Chainglider, designed for hub gearboxes with vastly larger markets than Rohloff, so much that they fitted them to the Rohloff, which then got in the way of the Chainglider and wore ridges (a perfectly valid alternative view to the one in the quotation given above), Hebie redesigned the rear end of the Chainglider to suit the Rohloff. The correct way to look at this is that Hebie, a large firm, did a smaller one, Rohloff, a very substantial favour, in accommodating a few Rohloff customers who were never going to be a major profit centre. But some insensitive idiot at Rohloff describes this in writing as "Hebie have had to re-think their chainglider numerous times over the years due to poor design", as if Hebie should have designed their Chainglider from the beginning to take account of the peculiarities of the Rohloff gearbox. In fact what Hebie did was to bend over backwards to adapt to changes in the shapes and dimensions of any and all hub manufacturers with a market presence that justified it, plus Rohloff. It would serve Rohloff right if Hebie now said, "Look, those mudpluggers don't want us, so to perdition with them." But it won't serve Rohloff's minority of non-mudplugger customers (tourers) who like the Chainglider well at all -- in fact, it would serve them very badly indeed. That is what I mean by a reckless letter.
Did you get this fellow's name, MacSpud? When my Chainglider no longer fits my Rohloff because of Rohloff's carelessness of customers and their reckless offense to Hebie, I want to send him the dry cleaning bill for the oily bottoms of my trousers.
"Irrelevent" (sic), indeed... This whole affair is very unlike Rohloff. I bet we'll discover that the letter to MacSpud was written by a junior exceeding his authority or an engineer (widely known to be an insensitive breed) overextending his grasp of English. I certainly hope so. But if not, my answer is above, and here is the executive summary:
As both a Rohloff and a Chainglider customer, I hope this post makes it quite clear to Hebie that
service@rohloff.de doesn't speak for me. I adore Hebie. And their Chainglider is one of the best products to come on the market for bicycles in the last couple of decades.
