Wasn't one of the later iterations literally just a derailleur in a box? AFTER having a true gearbox?
Santa Cruz Launches "Lightest & Strongest" DH Bike
- Thread starter webmonkey365
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Ignore that not sure if that was myth or true. Anyway if you are in California around Otter time we need to get you saddle time on a real DH trail then you will see a difference. Not Santa Cruz trails but steep ones down here. Also KID yes it was a DER. in a carbon box with ability to change gears at anytime at least in later versions.your making not sense
maybe we can agree that the whole point of having a bike "industry" is to have choices....
some of us like to have a dialled transmission system that always works, precisely, and when needed. We also don't like to have to work on it to keep it dialled and working precisely. We also may have a tendency of wrecking the current, let's call it "traditional" drivetrain system (derailleur on a hanger) because of terrain, rider style or whatever. It's not so much the cost, as the ruined ride, and having to limp back to trailhead with a broken drivetrain that's a pain in the @ss.
Currently, it seems that the only "innovation" that offers all these elements for us, is the gearbox. But for all it's R&D efforts, the bike "industry" isn't really working on providing that "choice" to a small niche of riders. They also seem to ignore the potential for growth of that niche, should an acceptable product choice be made available.
That's why you'll see us on these internet message boards, proclaiming our wants and needs, loud and clear for all to hear, everytime the next best thing comes out that doesn't address our needs... pretty simple right?
It's all about choice.
edited to add: that new V10 sure looks purdy. I bet it rides nice too. I wish it had a gear box.
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Within the 1st season it was just a derailleur in a carbon box. Also mounted in a place that would necessitate a redesign of the frames of almost every major player in the DH market... who are already stretched with carbon technology and new wheel sizes.
Don't expect them to pre-emptively develop a design around an acceptable product that may or may not yet exist. I would argue it doesn't yet.
26 vs 650b vs 29 = choice
Upside down vs right side up = choice
Aluminum vs carbon = choice
Single pivot and linkage = choice
Santa Cruz or a Zerode = choice
Conversely, imagine the reception if someone started posting in a Zerode thread complaining that with all their design prowess the frame is still aluminum?
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Well that's their own damn fault. I've no sympathy in that regard. I could almost say the same about carbon.
I still haven't ridden one and would really like to. But we've all spent years and years shifting gears with derailleurs and I agree with you that it's just not that big of a deal. But the system really is pretty archaic considering the amount of technology going into pretty much everything else.
I know it's a really big hurdle to standardize a system, get it light, and get frame makers to commit to certain limitations designing around one but like most things.......it's not like every fabricator is going to jump on board or be expected to do it overnight.
My biggest gripe at this point is the weird high single pivot suspension designs that seem to go along with the ones that do use them.
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1. I hope to never ever be in California around Sea Otter time
2. I have ridden a proper DH trail or 2 in my day
6. Please lets go back to talking about the v10. The thread is 9 pages and no one has said it looks flexy!!
*This discussion is too civil for RM, someone needs to get butthurt asap
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I live here and do not want to be here ever but yes the new V-10 looks sick.. and I will eventually get to ride one. Once I can save enough money see above about living in California. It is a 3" stroke shock correct?
Yes, 3" stroke starting with the V10.4.
joeg, any word on when the carbon swingarm will be available for 10.4 owners who wanna go full plastic too?
Historically, spare frame sections are available as crash replacement only, and not as stand alone retail items.
It would be nice to be corrected by JoeG, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.
I still dont understand why it has SRAM cranks on a Shimano equipped bike, on a brand whose team runs Shimano.
And if a Thomson post, why not a Thomson stem and not that silly 35mm Easton stuff? Nitpicky and vain - come at me bro!
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Looks flexy......anyway, another for gearbox which is really prevalent to me, is my constant fear of breaking chains or skipping gears (if it's a bit worn or muddy) and really mangling my knee/leg like I have done in the past.
It's no uncommon for stronger blokes to really rape a small 9-10sp chain or skip a tooth because of slight miss-alignment and cause themselves an injury, so much so I often don't put in all my strength because I'm worried about this.
There is actually choice for gb atm, the Nicolai Helius is pretty well perfect.
It's no uncommon for stronger blokes to really rape a small 9-10sp chain or skip a tooth because of slight miss-alignment and cause themselves an injury, so much so I often don't put in all my strength because I'm worried about this.
There is actually choice for gb atm, the Nicolai Helius is pretty well perfect.
Why are we talking about gearboxes now?
derailleur in a box makes me think of dick in a box...............
I think I drank the DW koolade, I want a pivot. nuff said
Gearboxes are a brilliant idea, especially when I'd generously guess at 90% of the mechs in shops can't even properly tear down and rebuild a fork. Its definitely a good idea to give muppets then to push a system out that they have no chance of fixing.
Regarding the V10c....just amazing. SC just continues to kick all kinds of ass. Super impressed.
Regarding the V10c....just amazing. SC just continues to kick all kinds of ass. Super impressed.
On a pinion, you have to change the oil every 10 000 km (involves a syringe in a hole, not exactly complicated) and at last count they get 60-100k km before anything else needs to be done, at which point you send it to them.
You're stating theory, not fact. What happens when a gear is misaligned? What happens when a tooth breaks? What happens when a pebble gets in there and buggers the whole thing? I somehow doubt shooting oil in with a syringe is going to fix that.
In theory, every mountain bike product is perfect and functions flawlessly, with no low oil levels or misaligned rears or problems of any sort.
Face it. When a gearbox goes to hell, very, very few people are going to be able to deal with it.
In theory, every mountain bike product is perfect and functions flawlessly, with no low oil levels or misaligned rears or problems of any sort.
Face it. When a gearbox goes to hell, very, very few people are going to be able to deal with it.
1. They're ex Porsche gearbox engineers who've done **** loads of testing on it.
2. Who cares if very few people are able to fix it, send it back to the manufacturer in the VERY unlikely event of it going south. Unlike most bike companies who are more interested in lattes, these guys are actually experienced engineers. How many people can fix your new VW ZF 8 speed auto box? Sure as **** not your local mechanic.
3. Current the shimano alfine is doing very well in terms of service life and people don't seem to whinge that their local pimple face bike mechanic can't fix it.
4. With that attitude I can't see you riding a carbon bike because oh you can't fix it at home with a ****ing shifter and some duct tape.
Come on dude, stop poking holes in a great product, people have to send things away for fixing all the time. I'm someone who'll happily take that risk with a gearbox.
Oh, they're ex-porsche engineers? That is supposed to mean something right?
When my derailleur breaks (it hasn't in about 7 years) I bolt on a new one in 10 minutes.
Glad you're a gear box fan, now please go buy a Pinion equipped bike and be happy.
*curiously enough you seem pretty sure of all the facts, despite Pinion being pretty tight lipped about their product: http://pinion.eu/en/discover-pinion/faq/
Go start a gear box thread. This one's about a frame you don't want anyway.
Hooray, bolt on a new $200 derailleur everytime it bends (you must ride fire trails if you haven't bent a derailleur in 7yrs)
Yeah it does mean something that they're Porsche engineers. Means they were a part of a company that actually required solid high performance results from their engineers.
I talked to Falco a fair bit, so yeah I am pretty sure.
People like you are what keep innovation from becoming reality. why don't you shack up with the Chinese, I hear they're pretty good at copying westerners and doing **** all new.
And yet those Porsche engineers still managed to design a system for bikes that only works with gripshift. Bloody brilliant!!
$200 for a derailleur ain't cheap but if you break them that often I'd suggest not buying the most expensive ones (though they are more durable. Still, $200 is a lot cheaper than the gearbox which last i checked was in the range of $3400 euro vs $1900 euro for standard frame
I can buy a lot of derailleurs for that much money.
You do realize that no major frame manufacturer is going to touch that thing, let alone completely redesign their entire frame/suspension design until a viable production gearbox has been produced and independently tested thoroughly? As of August PB only managed to ride a pre-production gearbox with mixed results a promises that the production one would 'address some of the issues' but not the gripshift. Yet some people are holding it up as the holy grail of drivetrain technology and the rest of us are just salty old cynics stifling innovation....
You want innovation, go back to page 1
A gearbox would be great if it met certain criteria, but at the moment that's a ways off from what many of us want. Especially those of us who don't live in constant fear that our derailleurs are about to self destruct (my '07 XO did a full season of racing, including 3 World Cup rounds, and another half season and 2 WC rounds in '08 before being retired to my city bike where it is still shifting nicely today). Sure, it could have broken any number of times, but at the moment the risk of drivetrain failure is not great enough for me to have much enthusiasm for a gearbox in it's current form. I'd rather see rad frames like the new V10
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This thread is awesome!
The number of times I have had to rebuild the gearbox in my car because a pebble got in there is borderline ridiculous.
Also haven't SC shacked up with the Chinese to make this frame.
It's almost as if all of the folk from Rotorburn have started posting on here, so much bickering over trivial ****!
The number of times I have had to rebuild the gearbox in my car because a pebble got in there is borderline ridiculous.
Also haven't SC shacked up with the Chinese to make this frame.
It's almost as if all of the folk from Rotorburn have started posting on here, so much bickering over trivial ****!
No one claims it has a high probability of happening. Though as with all bike parts reliability might be lower than on their original markets but that's not the problem. The problem is that it may happen and some people assume there are bike parts that never have issues.
Imagine a situation like this. I take a 10 day paid leave from my work. Thats 10 out of 26/year I have. I go to the alps for 2 weeks. After 3 days my gearbox fails. My fault or production flaw, no matter. I now end up with no bike. If it's Morzine, worse case scenario I can rent a bike and be grumpy about it while I spend way more than I planned but if it's somewhere more remote where there are fewer rentals I am screwed.
I'd really like to have a gearbox/pinion equipped bike but I really think some people over exaggerate how often you break your derail. I've had a lot issues with it this year and i was still able to rebuild it while all the issues were my fault. Previous years I lost 1 derail/season or even 2 seasons at times.
Good indication is Nicolai helius costs about $1100 euro less without gb, so it's really not that bad, remember it includes the equivalent of shifter, cranks, derailleur, cassette chain rings etc.
Grip shifter is purely preference, some people like them. I'd make a servo and electronic shift if my frame would just die so I can buy a new one.
Well I think it'll be sooner rather than later, people seem to love their zerodes and I'd love one if I still rode dh.
V10 looks like a great steed, but the drive train is the last blight on modern bikes.
Imagine you go to the alps and your frame cracks..seriously, not a great argument, that there's a possibility that it will fail and might be harder to get than regular kit, so it's no good. It's not the Finke rally, it's a bicycle.
But how often problems occur is what makes the difference. If you look at how little maintenance a Rohloff requires then I can only imagine how good a gearbox bike is.
And why hasn't anybody made the comparison with dirt bikes yet? When we talk about suspension this always comes up. How often do you have to rebuild your gearbox on your dirt bike? Do you do it yourself or have a mechanic do it? Did it die on a road trip and you were stranded not being able to ride and wasted vacation time?
Serious questions as I only ride streetbikes.
I just assumed something like the Alfine 11 would tick almost forever without ever a hitch in reliability or shifting performance, but a friend of mine has been researching them for a commuter bike build and mentioned he'd been put off by a lot of mixed reviews on both those fronts.
A quick google seems to agree:
http://forum.ctc.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=64432&start=45
There seems to be a few occurrences of gears shifting non-sequentially, problems with shifting under load, and oil leaking. Not sure if these problems are somehow nonexistent when the hub is not mounted in a wheel, though I can't see how.
Some of the comments there allude to the Rohloff being a significantly more reliable unit, but it's a lot more expensive - about three times as much.
A quick google seems to agree:
http://forum.ctc.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=64432&start=45
There seems to be a few occurrences of gears shifting non-sequentially, problems with shifting under load, and oil leaking. Not sure if these problems are somehow nonexistent when the hub is not mounted in a wheel, though I can't see how.
Some of the comments there allude to the Rohloff being a significantly more reliable unit, but it's a lot more expensive - about three times as much.
And you are restricted to their crank. Not to mention the only way you can spend 1100 euro on drivetrain is if you go mental and get all the top parts and not even look for deals.
You forget one important factor in the dirtbike vs mountain bike comparison. Weight. Mtb is all about loosing weight and it has been touched in the suspension topics. Dirtbike susp is more reliable because it can be stupid heavy. Mtb susp can't be. The same goes for mtb vs dirt gearbox. Also rohloff is reliable because of the same thing. It is idiotically heavy and with so few reviews it's hardly a large test group. If you want dirtbike reliability than you have to agree to dirtbike gearbox weight. Or at least something closer to that.
You get what you pay for.
I know a bunch of people on Rohloffs, some have hubs from pretty early batches. They move from bike to bike and rim to rim and all still go strong. Maintenance is basically changing the oil once or twice a year and replacing the sprocket. Also the hub bearings/seals have to be changed, similar to every other hub.Some small issue some had were the seals leaking a little oil when they took the bike on an airplane. Maybe a pressure issue?
Few reviews? You hopefully know that Rohloff dominates the high-end touring bike market. In 2008 they produced the 100.000. unit, don't know where there are now. If the product would be unreliable there would already be a forum post or two about it, don't ya think?
seems like it to me. the only way id buy one is IF it had a gripshift
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I like sandwiches.
That has about as much to do with this bike as all this stuff about gearboxes.
MMMMM sandwiches.
That has about as much to do with this bike as all this stuff about gearboxes.
MMMMM sandwiches.
Fair enough. Never seen any reviews on the mtb market. Still it is very heavy.Few reviews? You hopefully know that Rohloff dominates the high-end touring bike market. In 2008 they produced the 100.000. unit, don't know where there are now. If the product would be unreliable there would already be a forum post or two about it, don't ya think?
I've not seen any "gearbox" bikes using an Alfine 11 speed. There will be failures in anything. Generalizations are there to prove a general point. The points being, In theory, and more than likely in practice, a gearbox will be far more reliable than a conventional drive train, with less maintenance, more opportunities for shifting, centralized weight, less unsprung weight and so on. The expense to the consumer will be slight weight increase in the bikes weight. There will and has been bad designs, that's a given with anything. Alfine 11 is one of them. Picking a product that's not even used to bash a concept is pretty transparent. Plenty of carbon bikes have snapped, pretty trivial to the V10.
The current Pinion I doubt will suit everyone with so many gears, even with the ease of multi shifting with a grip shifter, shifting accuracy will become annoying with so many gears. Especially for DH application. For most other MTB applications, the Pinnion should be excellent. There's talk of a lesser geared lighter one for DH use in the works.
Shimanno Alfine 8 speed is working brilliantly in the Zerodes, and now with Sram triggers.
Rohloff worked well i the Lahar. Slightly to many gears, and grip shift that non gearbox users hate. But performance and durability were brilliant.
I like Turtles too.
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I think as long as you don't ride like a retard, and change your gearbox oil regularly, you shouldn't have problems with gears and teeth and such breaking. There are probably a million other things that will break first and/or more often. Although I haven't been riding dirt bikes for too long so...
http://my.jetscreenshot.com/demo/20121126-2bxa-119kb
Full XTR drivetrain from CR is 1100 Euros. If you stinged on the cranks, you could have it for a couple of hundred less, so almost exactly the same price as a pinon upgrade on a Nicolai, if your comparing equivalent high end setups (not really fair to compare x9 to it, well not in my mind).
If you went xx it would actually be cheaper for the GB. Maybe I'll stop derailing the thread, but I think everyones oggled over the new v10 enough..
Full XTR drivetrain from CR is 1100 Euros. If you stinged on the cranks, you could have it for a couple of hundred less, so almost exactly the same price as a pinon upgrade on a Nicolai, if your comparing equivalent high end setups (not really fair to compare x9 to it, well not in my mind).
If you went xx it would actually be cheaper for the GB. Maybe I'll stop derailing the thread, but I think everyones oggled over the new v10 enough..
Except there's already a gearbox thread that's almost 1000(!) posts long and it would far more relevant to froth over there.
The 2nd iteration was. The first one was a completely f'ing mental CVT linkage setup that didn't actually have any gear cogs at all. MBA had diagrams of it back in the day, I wish I could find them online somewhere - have searched for years and never gotten hold of them. Really cool technology for the sake of technology, but maybe not something that offered actual advantages over a certain number of fixed ratios.
As far as gearboxes in general go though - the reason they haven't taken off so far IMO is because nobody has nailed ALL the factors that need to be considered to make the bike an OVERALL better choice than any other bike. The Lahar did a pretty good job, and the Zerode in its footsteps, but in their gearbox attempts, a lot of bike manufacturers have completely overlooked the fact that geometry, weight, suspension, strength, standard parts etc need to be dialled as well as having what is essentially a moderate improvement to the drivetrain. No point slightly improving drivetrain reliability and noise if you're going to make the thing twice as heavy, or have terrible suspension, or 10 year old geometry.
First V10C was rad, this looks even better. If it's as strong as they claim it is, at that weight, that's some impressive engineering.