One year on the Giant Explore E+ 2 with a Rohloff Speedhub 500/14

My bike in my usual Adopt-a-Street work configuration, towing a trailer loaded with tools and supplies, and often bags of litter.

I thought since it’s been exactly a year since I upgraded my Giant Explore E+ to a Rohloff Speedhub 500/14 internal gear hub, that it’s a good time for an update. As for stats: I have put 5,180+ miles on this bike since the conversion.

A custom 3D-printed speed sensor mount

One of the items left unfinished with my initial upgrade to the Rohloff was mounting the speed sensor, which I initially left attached using a hand-cut piece of foam, some zip ties, and some tape:

Speed sensor mounted on a bit of foam with zip ties, held in place with tape just to keep it from sliding on the chainstay.

I initially intended to make a custom mount for it with my 3D printer, and recently got the 3D printer out of storage and set it up, modeled the part, and made it. It’s held on with (beefier) zip ties and double sided adhesive foam mounting tape. It looks great and is working very nicely, no longer getting shifted and out of line with the spoke magnet:

Speed sensor mounted on custom 3D-printed mount, zip tied and mounted with foam tape to the chainstay.

First failure: Worn Rohloff input sprocket

After several thousand miles, I noticed the chain was “skipping” under load, and after swapping chains it was still occurring. I took things apart and noticed that the input sprocket to the Rohloff was fairly worn. I put the bike through a lot towing heavy trailers up big hills, so I am not too surprised by this:

Rohloff input sprocket with worn teeth, stretched out from the original profile and marred.

This was a 14T sprocket, and I already had 15T and 16T sprockets on hand, so I decided to install a 15T sprocket instead, as I could use the even-lower gearing and didn’t need all the top-end in high gear. You can see the comparison between sprockets here:

Graph of gear ratios of Rohloff 500/14 with 14-, 15-, and 16-tooth input sprockets compared to the stock microSHIFT drivetrain gear ratios.

The swap completely resolved the skipping issues, and I am really liking the even-lower low gear.

Second failure: Cracks in the Velocity Cliffhanger rim

The biggest failure I had was a failure of the rim at 4,400 miles, with many spoke holes cracking, enough to ultimately lose all spoke tension:

Close up of the rim with a crack extending on each side of the spoke hole.

I ended up rebuilding the wheel (at home this time) on another new Cliffhanger rim identical to the first.

Wheel in process of being taken apart, with most spokes de-installed and flopping about.

What remains to be done

Not much, really! I still haven’t bothered to shorten the shifter cables, but doing so would probably make shifting a little easier by reducing friction. I’ll probably do that soon.

Conclusion

This was an excellent upgrade. While the implementation is not perfect (it could be better with a bike designed around the Rohloff), it works great. Performance-wise, it’s the best possible upgrade for this bike. I am in love with it.

What do you think?