One of the disadvantages of a belt drive is that changing gear range is expensive as you'll need new sprockets and a new belt, so it's important for the manufacturer to get it right in the first place. Nobody needs a 122-inch gear on a round-town bike, but if you were to venture out of town at the weekend you'd likely be grateful for something lower than that 30-inch bottom gear. With a 46-tooth chainring and 22-tooth sprocket, the Editor has a high gear of 122 inches and a low of 30. If you've got a pro team mechanic looking after your commuting bike then you're better off with derailleurs, at least as far as pure mechanical efficiency is concerned, but a belt-drive-and-Alfine system needs very little maintenance to keep it working pretty well, so it's still an attractive proposition for some applications.Ĭertainly, the Editor's drive doesn't feel draggy as you ride along it feels just like, well, a really nice bike. In other words, a perfectly clean and well-lubricated derailleur setup is better than an Alfine 11 hub, but the derailleur is severely degraded if you let it get clagged up with road crud, which is the way far too many utility bikes end up. However, an earlier study by James Spicer found a much wider range of efficiencies for derailleur gears, from 80.9% to 98.6%, depending on the operating conditions. A study by Elizabeth A Casteel and Mark Archibald found the Alfine 11-speed hub to have efficiencies from 90.44% to 96.63% depending on the gear, compared to 97.69% to 99.37% for a Shimano 7-speed derailleur system and 95.79% to 99.49% for a Rohloff Speedhub. Hub gears are often criticised for being less mechanically efficient than derailleur gears.
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