Goodbye to My Belt-Drive Rohloff Bike

It’s Christmas time, and I am saying goodbye to a friend that has been with me for years, while somebody else will get to share the holidays with her. It’s not a breakup with a wife or girlfriend but with a unique bike that silently got me through muddy rides with almost zero maintenance afterward. Somebody else will instead get to appreciate how she can shift while coasting and while stopped, never makes a clanking noise on the bumpiest descents, and never asks for chain lube.

One of the bittersweet things about being in the bike business is that I constantly sell my own personal bikes and frequently have to let go of bikes I’ve become attached to. This one is really special. I’ve never seen a similar bike, and there’s a bit of a mourning period I’m experiencing.

This bike is a full-suspension 29er with a Rohloff 14-speed internal-gear rear hub and a Gates Carbon Drive belt. How many of those have you ever seen? She has cool sliding dropouts to adjust the belt (or chain) tension. More importantly, she has our ConcenTrak pivot – a swingarm pivot centered on the bottom bracket shell. That’s what made it possible to make a belt-drive, Rohloff, or singlespeed drivetrain work on a full-suspension bike; centering the pivot on the bottom bracket means that the chainstay length, and hence the chain length, did not vary as the suspension moved.

She was special enough when she simply had a chain drive coupled with her internal gears and carbon rim, but she really shone when riding in mud and snow. Other riders would have grass, weeds, mud and ice jammed into their front derailleurs and piling up in their cogsets, and my drivetrain would be completely clean. There was no front derailleur or other obstruction behind the seat tube for the rear tire to keep depositing trail detritus into with each rotation. And consequently, there was no metal conveyor belt carrying bits of that detritus back to the rear derailleur and cogs. But then the Gates belt drive made it even more special with that whirring noise and soft feel on the pedals with nary a metallic sound.

The Rohloff never shifted as fast under load as today’s XTR, XX, X0, and XT, etc. drivetrains, but, on the other hand, none of those drivetrains could shift while coasting or while standing still. Yes, it was a bit of a pain to have to soft pedal when shifting and to actually stop pedaling momentarily to make the shift in the middle, around gear seven, where the planetary gears make their big internal switchover that allows the Rohloff hub to have as much gear range as a standard 3 X 9 MTB drivetrain without being twice as big in diameter as it already is. But it was totally sweet when hanging on for dear life on a descent, standing on the pedals without rotating them, yet shifting from the highest to lowest gear with a simple twist of the wrist.

The reward was being prepared on the very first pedal stroke to go up the super steep incline out of the gully I was dropping into, rather than chunking gears and losing momentum while trying to shift down across the cogset as well as the chainring set. The reward also came when forced to stop while climbing fast. I could simply shift to low gear while standing still and start up again without having to stand there and lift my rear tire and turn the cranks a few times to get into that low gear.

Sure, she weighed three pounds more than my otherwise identical three-inch-travel 29er built up with XTR, and that extra weight was all concentrated on the rear wheel. But she also had an extremely high gee-whiz factor with the belt, the Rohloff hub, and the ENVE (called EDGE at the time I got it) carbon rear rim I had built onto it with bladed spokes to keep that rear wheel weight to a minimum. Nobody gawked at my XTR bike like they did at her, and nobody’s bike sounded like her while pedaling, either. I could sneak up on unsuspecting riders, even ones without Skull Candy plugged into their ears, and zoom by with them wondering where I had just appeared from.

Her frame’s brown anodization (a poor choice in the first place) had faded to a light pinkish-purplish, and I’d had to hack a big hunk out of her right swingarm to clear for the Gates Carbon Drive front sprocket, but I still loved the way she looked.

I hadn’t been able to see her much recently, since she’s been on loan for many months to a tall customer who needed a tall full-suspension 29er in a hurry. He had special rides he couldn’t bear to miss with a friend dying of cancer who might not be able to ride with him anymore after this season. Waiting for the new full suspension 29er (with a standard drivetrain) would have him miss the season, and he would otherwise have to buy something too small for himself off the shelf in order to be able to accompany his friend on their bucket-list rides. So, while he awaited construction of his new bike, I loaned him my belt-drive Rohloff bike (I wonder why I never named her …).

We (Zinn Cycles, I mean) always have to have good-condition new bikes around here for test rides for the next 6’6”+ potential customer who comes along, so I make one for myself in every model we offer – mountain, road, cyclocross and track. But then I become attached to them and really don’t want to let them go when they become too scratched to look like show bikes anymore. Sometimes, we have to upgrade my bike even sooner, before it even looks or feels used, because we’ve changed tubing shapes or the style of head tube/headset/fork we’re using on mountain, or the number and location of S&S break-down couplers we’re using on travel bikes.

Sometimes, I’m just not ready to let one go, and this is one of those times. On the other hand, I can look forward to a new bike to replace her in the coming year that I’ll also fall in love with, and it warms my heart knowing that somebody else will get to fall in love with her and appreciate her quirky personality like I did. So maybe it’s appropriate to make this transition as the year comes to a close and this festive season is upon us.

Happy Holidays!
― Lennard

FILED UNDER: Bikes and Tech TAGS: Belt-drive / Rohloff