One thing I would recommend, to anyone who really abuses their Rohloff, is to simply change the oil more often. If you buy in bulk, the oil is not very expensive. You can reuse both syringe and oil drain screw.
A complete oil kit with two bottles, a fresh syringe and new plug stud costs under 15 Euro and under $20. That's very little to spend to keep a gearbox sweet that costs well north of a thousand smackers. Not to mention that it effectively turns your warranty into a lifetime warranty, given only that Herr Rohloff continues his present practice of not charging for repairs to regularly serviced Rohloff boxes if not obviously seriously abused by the owner.
All the engineers here know that the famous Jaguar twin-cam XK engine was designed as the ne plus ultra of pre-war grand prix engines. As such it was a piece of jewelry enlarged, difficult and expensive to work on. As a student at Stellenbosch, I trashed my Porsche racing in the storm drains on the way to Bulawayo, and had to buy another car in a hurry without too much money. I bought a Mark II Jaguar with 250,000 miles (read that again, it's a quarter-million miles) on the clock for fifty pounds. I thrashed that car for another thirty thousand miles towing my racing cars, set a national record in it (under ten hours for 1010 miles on public roads), and then sold it on. I bought it from the Rhodesian Highway Police, who had never allowed the engine to become cold, and drained the oil hot, like a religion, every 3000 miles, a practice my racing mechanics continued. So did the next owner, a redneck racer, who eventually had to open the bottom of the engine at 330,000 miles.
So I'm not impressed with a Rohloff gearbox doing 100,000km, or 100,000miles for that matter, which gets Herr Rohloff and his merry men (and women!) all excited. I see absolutely no reason a gearbox built on the lines the Rohloff is built shouldn't last indefinitely, certainly several generations of cyclists, if it is serviced, like a religion, by changing the oil every 5000km/3000m or every year, whichever comes first.
Yo, OnR, the cleaning oil will become less black with successive services; that gave me too a bad fright the first time, as I thought my expenesive gearbox was going to last 5000km.... And you always get less oil back than you put in. About 12ml clings to the gears.
