Shimano’s three-pulley rear derailleur could revolutionise drivetrain design
bikeradar.com
bikeradar.com
I have the wireless electronic sram shifting on my 1x Lauf. It is kind of expensive, but amazing and worth the simplicity of it all. It just works and shifts perfectly every time.
I could never go back to cables. The revolution will be to figure out ways to make this same electronic shifting technology less expensive so that it can be installed on every non-e-bike out there.
I do agree with your first point, I don’t see much revolutionary here.
- Another battery to recharge
- Proprietary battery format making replacements difficult
- Needing an app to make simple adjustments. Hopefully it runs and is still compatible after 10+ years of ownership!
Bike components are wonders of precision machining and modern materials but conceptually, they have a beautiful simplicity. Not to get too "give up programming for woodworking" but all of that goes flying out the window the moment you add a proprietary wireless protocol and closed hardware in the middle of it.
The battery replacement is the real issue as technology gets older. Though to be honest, at some stage it gets more difficult to find parts for any system. I started to run into challenges sourcing several replacement parts for a 8-9 year old bike that had 10 speed Shimano group set, so it got sold and replaced. Batteries are not much different really.
I can't say I've had any problems with getting maintenance parts for my 2004 (19 years old) Shimano XTR mountain bike.
Example: https://www.amazon.com/Jagwire-Inline-Indexed-Tension-Adjust...
I've been riding and racing bikes since I was 15 years old and I'm nearly 50 now.
Not much different than a mech cable snapping or the derailleur not being adjusted correctly by a tiny set screw and the chain ending up in your spokes.
Shit has catastrophic failures... that's never going to stop being a problem.
In my experience, jockey pulleys don't add too much friction, as they're not under a great amount of force and don't fail all that often - for the same reasons. It's the derailleur arm itself that's very likely to take damage from abuse (by bending out of spec).
I would say the use of a clutch on a rear derailleur - something your SRAM 1x most certainly has, leaks more watts (tho v. v. little) - the compromise is certainly worth is, especially for the gear cluster spread you're running on the back.
This design looks just to be an improvement of some sort of clutch system, with purpose to try and move the derailleur arm out from being so low, where lovely things like rocks can hit it. That seems like a win to me, given my own assessment of how these things become worthless paperweights.
SRAM actually seems to be all-in on making rear derailleur replaceable in piecemeal, which seems to be a nice improvement over the design, in a very Right To Repair kinda way.
https://bikerumor.com/next-gen-sram-eagle-direct-mount-derai...
I'm not sure why such a design can't be run wireless if that's your preference. Looking at Shimano's offerings, even the 105 is electric these days.
But again: this is just a patent for an idea - it's not the first time Shimano has done this obviously
> Can you expand on your idea of why you think Shimano doesn't look relevant now? ... On road, every World Tour team, save 3 are running Shimano.
They all use electronic shifting. This is not the way to compare relevancy, given that it is a sponsorship. Next year, sram comes out with a better financial deal for the team than shimano and they go with them.
But the business of World Tour temas is also to win, as winning means being invited to the big races, which actually have coverage for the ads-on-wheels that riders are to get eyeballs on. If they can't win because of crap gear, they won't use said gear, no matter how much money given to them.
It's a fine balance, right? Some riders of high talent are also pretty controlling on the gear they use, and will bring their own bike sponsor into a team as part of the deal of transfer. Chicken and egg I guess: if the gear is irrelevant, you'll never see it on the Pro Tour.
But why bother when ebikes are already cheaper? BAFANG motor with battery conversion kit is 2/3 of the cheapest SRAM kit available($1.2).
Given that electronic shifting is still $1.2k, it would be nice to lower that cost a bit so that all price points can participate more easily.
The batteries in the levers last a long time since they are just used for a button press. They are worth it. Never had an issue with signal or shifting.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bicycle-gearbox-sys...
Still growing at a nice rate and every single pro team has been using it for years now.
All I see now around where I live, which is heavily bike centric, are e-bikes...
For the same reason, what the pros do on their rigs is no concern for the 99.9% of mountain bikers.
I wouldn't bring anything I can't repair or troubleshoot directly out in the mountains, let alone anything that can discharge and not work anymore.
Shimano also brought electronic to their 105 line and SRAM has it on Rival. Neither is high end, never mind ultra high end. I’m not a MTBer so I’m not aware of how that market is, but electronic shifting is definitely prevalent in road, gravel and cross.
But two-pulley designs solve some of the radial movement required for the "selector" pulley (the one responsible for lateral) to deal with a wide range of sprocket radii by the offset between pulley and cage pivot: The line between upper pulley and pivot is at a considerable angle to the line between pivot and the other pulley. In a three pulley setup, I'd expect everything to become far too unpredictable if they still kept the selector pulley offset from its closest pivot. If balancing two pivots with a B-screw is difficult, imagine having to balance three pivots with a "B" and a "C" screw! And I'd imagine the impact of imperfect balance to be far worse in a three-pivot situation... (with two pulleys/pivots B-screw adjustment is more nice to have than requirement)
I'm amazed with hub gears and when Honda simply put the derailleur and freehub in the frame with their old downhill bike, that this is still the best solution on the mass market.
I've never seen hub gears on light or even medium weight hybrid/city ALU bikes. Which suggests there is a problem with hub gears. Maybe they are heavier, or more expensive, or harder to maintain, but they are not popular.
The downsides:
* It's heavier than a derailleur/cassette
* More drivetrain losses
* It's expensive.
Upsides:
* Maintenance is replacing the oil about once a year.
* You can shift from a stop.
* Easier to adjust.
I've got a couple of bikes with old Sturmey Archer 3-speed gear hubs, and they're utterly bulletproof. I've had each one open exactly once, when I got it and wanted to make sure it was in good condition before putting it on a wheel. Plus I was curious.
The other thing in my opinion, though I love hub gears, modern derailleur systems with a zillion gears aren't all that bad. Especially with indexed shifting, which we've now had for decades. They're exposed to the weather, but most people don't ride in bad weather.
Since you mention hybrid/city, that's my category. I use my bike for commuting to work, shopping, and weekend recreational rides. I'm in no way fast nor competitive, so the weight and efficiency issues are secondary for me. But also, the 3-speed is a sweet spot where its efficiency actually rivals derailleurs.
Compensating for both things becomes a habit. Likewise, remembering not to shift at a stoplight becomes a habit with derailleurs. You reach a point where you begin to think like your bike.
Given that I'm a casual cyclist on a non-sporty bike, I just live with the slight awkwardness when I'm halfway up a hill and realize that I chose the wrong gear.
But except for the Rohloff, they all have a smaller gear range than a derailleur, so there are tradeoffs.
If you want to know what's premium for everyday utility cycling, look at the ebike space, where people are shelling out thousands for bicycles just to use them a vehicles. Hub gears are not dominant, but are very well represented on price points over $2k.
For high-end mountain bikes, makers are actually experimenting with removing gears from internal gear hubs[1] because for less mass, they want to keep the full range of gears but use less in the middle.
[1] They are not very common but there are some high end downhill bikes that use an internal gear hub, located near the bottom bracket. They are simply too heavy and expensive to appear on other types of bikes.
I had to go extreme measures to find 1:3 sprocket set for my 20' folding bike. Originally I was constantly switching between 1 and 2 and never using number 3.
Also, 3-speed bikes in the US were sold with no gearing options. Schwinn geared them too high in my opinion. In England, the bike dealers were instructed to work with the customer to choose a cog that was appropriate for each rider's terrain and physique.
I've geared mine based on the realization that my top speed is likely to be limited by wind resistance and my own physique, and I don't need gears that are faster than I can ride.
There was an American cyclist (which I shall not name) who had a high cadence style and would attack on the hills. Part of his attack was quickly going into the big ring. They accomplished this with a down tube shifter that was perfectly set to just flip them into the big ring (STI existed but suffered from shifting under a high load - as well as being somewhat heavy for a high climb bike), while they were already quickly dancing on the pedals on the small, so a high load was less of a problem.
Quite clever, actually.
In the usual case, you have pulley wheels both shifting and tensioning the chain. Fine for most road bike use cases, but that leaves lots of room for chain slap in gravel and mtb use cases.
The viability of this design depends, it seems, on whether it adds less drivetrain loss than a clutch, and if added weight can be kept low.
https://www.disraeligears.co.uk/site/suntour_xc_derailleur_3...
I don't understand why you wouldn't just get off the bike and walk instead of shifting to some 42T+ cog. It would be less embarrassing.
As a personal stylistic choice I always write “derailer”, which is the same way all Americans pronounce it.
> I am on a one-man campaign to replace the foreign spelling "dérailleur" with the English spelling and pronunciation "derailer."
English spelling often gives hints about where words were at the time of the Great Vowel Shift, when printing was just starting to standardize orthography. We got a mishmash of various places, and words that entered after can be spotted from words that entered before.
This is of course a much more modern word. But the French were the innovators in cycling and they got to set the word, and mostly the spelling (though we did lose the diacritical mark).
You can try to update the spelling, but that rarely works. Autocorrect will likely entrench weird English orthography further.
Oddly, if I type dérailler, my phone automatically adds the accent (because I have a French keyboard installed. That is a different French word, or rather, it's the infinitive "to detail". It's pronounced duh-rye-a.