I must say, if I knew about tiny white plastic bits being in charge of the final drive, I'd have tried again with Shimano boxes or waited for the Pinion.
It's worse than Manfred the wing nut, John. Much. I believe Dan has Barbara Rohloff's book, and has read it, so he can correct me. But the legend is that two mud pluggers got married and went off on their honeymoon with their bikes. Riding with wild abandon on a beach, the derailleurs of both bikes got sand in them and were wrecked beyond operation. So the bridegroom, a young engineer of no particular distinction to this point (except that from our perspective graduation from a German technical school is already a very high distinction), one Bernd Rohloff, spent his honeymoon designing a sandproof transmission, and while he was about it, being German, he also made it proof against cyclists and other holy fools. Presumably Frau Rohloff's book recounts her reaction to speeding from newly married to golf widow in a few days...
Actually, on second thoughts, don't correct me, Dan. I like my retelling of the legend much better than inevitably dull truth.
I'm interested in the intersections of technology with psychology and economics, so thanks, John, for setting this up (next time I'll your straight man): I think the Rohloff gearbox demonstrates the huge benefit of being designed by one obsessed engineer and not having a committee in charge. The first parameter a committee would have set would have been low mass, and right there disaster would have struck the project -- and by now the Rohloff would have been forgotten. Instead it grows from strengh to strength exactly because weight was not the first consideration. Knee-jerk reactions by people with their minds set on railroad tracks in their youth, almost always reinforced in committees, who in late middle age still don't merely ride or exercise, but "train", are responsible for probably 90% of what is wrong with bicycles today, and 100% of unsuitable components on bikes to which the components' design criteria have no earthly functional relevance. Rohloff was further lucky -- and so are we -- in that the most upmarket of the German baukasten (they're a sort of semi-custom bike manufacturers, this one known as the Rolls-Royce of German bike manufacturers, a good description) immediately took up the Rohloff for their touring bikes, a steady, prestigious market Herr Rohloff had probably not considered. But again, Utopia are nutters for functional design, no matter how unconventional, and besides test every component to destruction before fitting it to their bikes so that their ten-year guarantee has real bite, and therefore wouldn't have touched the Rohloff if it were designed down to a "cycling mass" and thus a less than permanent installation.
