Shand Bahookie Dropbar Rohloff - poor quality review

Hiya BlindFreddy! 

First up, I'll point out that 3.5 stars is a positive review - it ranks as 'good' on our scoring scale. That said, the Rohloff is such a huge part of the cost of the bike and also dominates how it rides to such a degree that it had a fairly large weighting on the overall review score of the bike.

I'm aware that many people are die-hard Rohloff fans and wouldn't consider anything else, but I do my level best to base my opinions and writing on my experience of the thing in question - and my experience of how it worked in this application was not good. I believe that most other people would feel the same, given the compromises inherent in using this system on this bike.

"Cyclisto, I trust you read that the Rholoff can be readily controlled by a brifters device and not some substandard attachement on the stem."

This particular setup was actually controlled by brifters, namely modded SRAM Rival units with a Gebla box to make it all work. I did say in the review that I thought that setup was preferable to the stem mounted shifter, but they're still not very good from an ergonomic point of view, in my opinion. Certainly nowhere near as pleasant to use as cheaper options available from Shimano and SRAM.

"Lets be very clear, I do not use Rohloff or have a Shand bicycle."

Okay - I've ridden a couple of Shands in my time plus Rohloffs, Alfine hubs and Pinion gearboxes - plus pretty much every derailleur gear system going on the off-road side since the mid-2000s and an awful lot on the road too. In my experience, neither the Rohloff nor the Pinion 'boxes like shifting under any sort of load and they both only have flat bar twist shifter options from factory. Rohloff has an electronic shifter in the pipeline apparently, so fingers crossed for that to reach production soon.

"Some of my mates have found Rohloff very satisfactory. I siply dislike the petty injustice inflicted by this review. Shame Jon did not have a Shand equipped with Dura Ace whereupon his review may have been unambiguously positive!"

The review and associated score are to do with this specific build of the bike. If Shand did a Shimano 105 version of the bike I'm sure I'd have preferred the way it worked - and it would have been significantly cheaper too I imagine. Unfortunately, they don't offer such a build on their site - or any derailleur gear option. I can't review and score something that I haven't ridden.

Hope that it explains it some and makes the score make sense. Cheers!

Hangabout - you haven't actually ridden that Shand, or a Rohloff 14-speed hub, or the adapted Sram shifters on it, but feel that your opinion is more valid than the reviewer's?

Righty-ho.

I loved that review. I had rolhoff as a fantasy item and this review proved that it is a bit of crap when paired with dropbars saving me time of daydreaming and potentially a lot of money.

I thought it was quite a balanced review of that particular version of the bike myself.

So to summarise: Your opinion is more valid than his opinion and your opinion is that you are more objective than him so that means he must apologise.  

Personally I thought it was a pretty balanced review highlighting that for all but a very niche subset of riders, the gearing is far too much of a compromise and lets down what is otherwise a very good bike.  That's just my opinion too  Let's have a manly hug, a firm handshake and agree to disagree about such trivialities.

I will proactively offer an apology for being rude in my previous post.  That was unnecessary.

I think that BlindFreddy owes Jon Woodhouse an immediate apology and should take his medication as quickly as possible.