Surly disk trucker with Alfine 11.

Well its finished - it was 'finished' a while ago but now its finished again as I have made a few changes such as fat tyres, brooks saddle, MTB cranks replacing the single speed chain set I had fitted, and now front and rear racks. This should be it for a while now with little more than minor tweaks here and there. I have covered far fewer miles on this bike than I had hoped by this point (lack of time, etc), only 400 miles so far.

I am though very, very happy with this bike; the Surly frame is great to ride, the Sun Rhyno Lite rims feel indestructible and combined with the fat tyres it makes for a very comfortable ride. The tyres can go to fairly high pressure so no great loss of efficiency but I have really appreciated the large pneumatic capacity and strong wheels when I have smashed my way through some large potholes that I had somehow not seen coming. The Alfine hub I am pleased with too, although with a few issues, more on that further down....

Steel steed; Gucci Tubus rack on the back and cheap alloy rack on the front as this should see a lot less use and much lighter weights.

This is a very sturdy bike which is exactly what I wanted in a tourer but that does come with a weight penalty, the bike as you see it in these pictures weighs in at 16kg, I could have built it lighter and I could yet shave off some weight but I don't really see a great need. If I had built a lightweight tourer but I wouldn't have felt comfortable in taking it off road with heavy panniers (not so with this bike).

How phat is that front tyre? Plus headlight probe device thrusting out the front..

I really like the Alfine hub, it should require next to no maintenance, is nearly silent to operate, should last forever, and a great feature is being able to change gears without moving. I do however have a few issues with the Alfine hub, 99% of the time it works perfectly smoothly, but on occasion it has;

1. Disconcerting clicks and skips of the gears.
2. On a few occasions I have had the gears disconnect and give no resistance for a quarter of a turn - generally on a downwards pedal stroke thus smashing my soft bits into the saddle before carrying on as normal.
3. One occasion of the gears seeming to skip out completely, grinding around a full turn (very unpleasant).
4. When changing down the gears from 7th to 6th an extra push on the gear change is sometimes needed to move down the gears.
5. It does seem to prefer lifting off slightly when changing gears - contrary to the Shimano blurb which states that unlike other and older IGH it isn't necessary with the Alfine to relax peddling when changing gear.

Fairly cheap and heavy Shimano Alvio triple MTB chainset replaces the On-One single speed, the wider spread of the MTB cranks makes for a  more stable feeling ride. Only the middle chainring remains on the chainset as I dont have a front derailleur.

 

 All this does sound like a pretty damming review of the Alfine hub, but I must stress that for most of the time the hub performs very well. I think that with a normal derailleur system I would have experienced many more crunches and crashes of gears and so my critisism at this stage stems from the facts that;

 a) Most of the time the hub works silently so any skip or slip is that much more noticeable.

 b)The gear change is generally very smooth and easy, so again, any deviation from this is noticed.

 c) Its so bloody expensive that I am very aware of every unexpected noise or skip. 

So in summary, I suppose that an IGH is still a very new thing to me and will take a bit more getting used to, unlike a derailleur system where problems can be seen and fixed, with the Alfine its all hidden away so can seem a bit like black magic.

If anyone has questions or coments about this bike I would be happy to hear them, and if any Alfine users out there have experienced any of the minor issues that I have mentioned then I would be very happy to hear how you are doing with the hub so far.

Once I have serviced the hub and then done some more mileage I will write another post to update how I am finding it. I am hoping that after its first oil change it will smooth out a little.