- This implies something other than the current rotary-grip shifter; perhaps something like the present rotary, slimmed down and snugged firm against the side of the stem or the rotary grip with a thumbable fin extension to actuate the dial?
Quite a bit of misguided cleverness here, solutions to the wrong problem.
Tick off the great truths of derailleur gear chances: you change to the right gear before you need to, and you change one gear at a time because that is the efficient way to keep up speed, and you need to be moving to change gear.
None of this is true on a Rohloff gearbox. If you're lazy, you can change into the right gear after it becomes obvious you need it. You can change several gears at once without any penalty. And you can change gears at a perfect standstill.
Forget the ratios; they turn out to suit 99.99 of people once they get a little experience with them; the important thing is to get the right starter ratio (gear 11 is direct drive) for your sort of riding and roads and loads, from the illegal 36x16 that Andy Blance likes for heavily laden touring in muddy, mountainous places, through the warrantied 38x16 I find enough even on my steep but short home hill, all the way to the common 42 and 44 and even 46 chain wheels with 16 or 17 tooth sprockets liked by the fast tourers.
If you get this right, the Rohloff box will invite you to change gears all the time, and if you get it wrong, you will
have to change gears all the time. Whichever it is, you will not only change gears differently from on derailleur bike, but more often. After the Rohloff box is worn a little past its first awkwardness (several of us have written on this board about the agricultural aspects of the best bicycle gearbox in the world), you won't even notice that you're changing gears all the time.
We hear a lot about efficiency from the derailleur crowd, and I imagine you could write enticingly about it too, but it is always under the assumption that you choose your gear at the bottom of the hill, because once you start the hill, you're stuck with it. That is clearly a compromise solution, efficiency bartered for a mechanical necessity.
Neither the assumption of one gear, nor the place of its choice, holds true for a Rohloff. You just change gears all the way up the hill to give you the most efficient ratio at any point, not some notional average efficiency for the whole hill, chosen at the bottom, as with derailleurs.
I trust you can now see why the Rohloff box's control must be permanently under your hand (I could never understand the stupidity of making it triangular -- that's leftover roadie influence and thinking, quite irrelevant) or only a finger and thumb movement away.
In my non-roadie opinion a roadie who puts the control of Rohloff gearbox more than millimetres from his handhold has misunderstood its capabilities and purpose, and will never realise its full potential.
My ideal Rohloff gearshift grip is just plain round, the full length of the straight part of your handlebar (sawable to length like a steerer tube), minimum length the full width of your handgrip, meant to be dressed up in whatever you have on the other side (leather, foam, cork, anything) like a motorcycle accelerator grip.
Andre Jute
