Originally Posted by
70sSanO
The idea of a 6 speed Uniglide hub is good. I’d go a bit farther and find a 7 speed Uniglide/Hyperglide freehub body with a thin flange and mount it to a deep flange hub. I’ve done this with a Hyperglide body and a shim and didn’t have an issue with the hub bevel. You should pick up a couple mm’s in freehub body width.
You can do that but more gears is a slippery slope. If you think you want 7 soon you'll want 8 then 9 then12. All that gets you into fancy cogs with shaped teeth that put sideway stretch on ultranarrow chains, and if you have close gears you're gonna want to shift more often so you'll want Ergo shifters. That's all racing stuff but for touring it's better to keep it simple with 6s old school downtube friction shifters and wide chains, especially if reliability and simplicity are your main concerns. It seems like the OP is over the more-gears-is-more-better syndrome anyway.
FWIW Jobst Brandt thought 7s was the optimum, even for his death march tours in the mountains.
em